admin Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new film Saltburn is not short on things to unpack and obsess over: Jacob Elordi’s eyebrow ring, Barry Keoghan’s birthday suit, not one but two scenes involving sensuous consumption of bodily fluids— and the list goes on. But despite that bounty, the thing no one’s been able to stop talking about, from the early reviews through to the discussions around the movie’s wide release, is the film’s timeline. Specifically, how fast and loose Fennell appears to have played with her own setting.
Saltburn’s twisty, murderous, at times highly erotic tale follows Oliver and Felix, two students who strike up a friendship during their freshman year at Oxford before Felix invites Oliver to spend the following summer at his family’s titular estate. The Saltburn timeline discourse got a new wrinkle this past weekend courtesy of that Oxford set-up. Wouldn’t a banner welcoming the “Class of 2006” mean that the film is even earlier in the aughts—like, say, 2002 going into the summer of ‘03? Felix should be wearing an alarming amount of Abercrombie & Fitch, listening to G-Unit and watching Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, no?
Well, as a tweet pointing this out helpfully explained, they do things a little bit differently across the pond: that Oxford banner would actually refer to the year the students were coming in, not the year they’d graduate. If that’s not enough, Fennell confirmed in a Hype interview with British GQ that the bulk of the film is indeed set in the summer of 2007. Major anachronistic catastrophe averted.
But if the movie does indeed take place in 2007, the chronology-flub sticklers are right about more than a few things. For instance, one charming scene finds the Catton family plus Ollie and catty cousin Farleigh cracking up at Superbad during a family movie night. That movie wasn’t released in theaters until late summer ‘07, and in a pre-V.O.D. era, it wouldn’t have been available to watch at home until closer to Halloween. But hey, maybe England’s one percent get things early on disc—it’s not like they’d actually go to a theater with the rest of us peasants, right?
You have to shrug a little bit harder later in the film when a cringey karaoke party scene works in “Low,” Flo Rida’s ode to Apple Bottom jeans. That also wasn’t released until the fall of 2007, and even then, you’d have to imagine the blokes needed an extra couple of weeks or months for it to be big enough to reference—no disrespect to Flo’s intercontinental appeal, but it was his debut single after all.
