The movie Emerald Fennell was forcibly restrained from watching: “My mother had to put a stop to it”
Like most filmmakers whose projects have an immediate cultural impact, Emerald Fennell is one of the most polarising figures in film.
You don’t need to go much further than Saltburn to understand why. At first glance, it seems as though this might solely be to do with its explicit scenes, but upon closer inspection, it’s clear that many of the reasons why the film was so divisive were its handling of wealth and obsession, and its commentary on the lengths people go to when they desire something.
However, Fennell was making big, sweeping statements long before her 2023 thriller became a significant touchpoint of modern discourse, where her debut, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, also launched a whole flurry of discourse about feminism and revenge films, and immediately set her apart as someone who isn’t afraid to take on the big, difficult topics.
These interests can be found in some of Fennell’s favourite films as well, for as someone who prefers to get under the skin of society’s more nuanced and taboo topics, it’s no surprise that one of them is the 1999 classic Cruel Intentions, in which the students deceive each other and plan revenge on one another.
She has always been drawn to those with a more psychological undertone, including The Shining and Psycho, both of which once made it onto her list of best-ever movies and are the ultimate embodiment of horror cinema at its most meticulous, building suspense over a collection of masterful scenes to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and constantly guessing.
Many of these traits can be found in Fennell’s own movies as well; for instance, she pays close attention to the nuances of dialogue and social cues to create scenes and dynamics that can be interpreted in multiple ways, ultimately leading you down several potential paths when trying to figure out where her narratives are going to go.
And when it comes to the romance element of her stories, she learned from the best, too, as like many who also went through a handful of life-altering years when Leonardo DiCaprio was the hottest thing in film, Fennell developed an intense adoration for Baz Luhrmann’s classic epic romance, Romeo + Juliet.
A true testament to the fact that when the director loves something, she truly adores it, is the fact that she became so obsessed with the movie that her mother had to practically peel her away from the screen and stop her from watching it over and over. It makes sense when you think about it: it has everything Fennell loves in film, which is brutality, love, and twists and turns.
But, as she once recalled, it got to a tipping point: “All of the movies I grew up loving had that tragic, romantic, or kind of violent romance. I think of Romeo + Juliet. I saw that 11 times in the cinema until my mother had to put a stop to it.”
