Out of all the movies I took the opportunity to watch in 2023, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy Saltburn and that it wasn’t one of my top three favorite movies from 2023. The writing and cinematography work by Emerald Fennell’s was incredible. The entire movie was what I’d define as the perfect psychodrama, and people on public forums such as Rotten Tomatoes either agree or disagree with me.

I remember when the advertisements started showing up on my feed, each clip made my desire to go see the movie increased. There was something so alluring and mysterious about it, that made me want to get in my car, drive to the movie theatre, pay for a ticket, and watch it. And as soon as my friend offered to take me I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity, I had just seen Trolls Band Together a few days before so I needed to watch something drastically different. We went to a late showing of it, and were met with three couples in the theatre, eight people relatively unaware of what we were about to witness.

I say relatively because the “disturbing bathtub scene” was being talked about all over my TikTok feed, and when that scene happened I was unphased. It was way less disturbing in comparison to the “grave scene”…I don’t understand why that wasn’t being talked about?? initially I’m not going to lie it was a bit shocking, but then you see the rest of the stuff Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver Quick does and even that seems tame.

After going through audience reviews, I found one comment from today that sums up the movie extremely well:

I feel like the common thing among these posts that they don’t understand that this movie is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, its meant to be disturbing. It’s essentially a sociopath ripping apart a family that falls within dysfunctional moneyed class, and he’s willing to do so by any means necessary.

It will leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths because its just not the movie for them, I came back from winter break and watched it with my friends, three out of four of them enjoyed it, they were partially disturbed initially but by the end they were completely fine. We had a great discussion about class issues and the cynical acts of Oliver Quick. I might’ve accidentally traumatized the other friend with one of the scenes, because it was my job to tell her to cover her eyes during the disturbing scenes and I forgot how quickly it comes on-

Nevertheless, the Rotten Tomatoes community’s comments on numerous movies are always so interesting. I get a kick out of reading their comments on movies that I enjoyed but everyone else seemed to absolutely hate. The platform is completely open for deliberation, that the entire purpose of this site, it allows people to see how their opinion compares with others, and helps them decide whether or not it’s worth the price of a ticket or if they should wait for it to come on a streaming platform.

Now to close this out with some of my favorite reviews from the “top critics” of this platform: