When Pleasure Turns Against Itself
The surface of a champagne glass trembles almost imperceptibly; within it, the world it contains refuses to settle into stillness. Bubbles rise, but their trajectories never fully submit to prediction. The cinema of Emerald Fennell begins in precisely this sensation of unstable ascent. It appears polished, even graceful, yet beneath that surface a force is constantly at work, revising direction. Emotion does not accumulate in any linear way; at certain moments, it betrays its own meaning, slipping into an entirely different current.
The first impression of Promising Young Woman is almost excessively accommodating. Its colors are soft, its frames composed with reassuring stability, its characters arranged as if within the horizon of some romantic possibility. Yet this “possibility” soon collapses under the pressure of repetition. As similar scenes recur, the emotions they once promised begin to hollow out. What matters here is not event but rhythm. When an identical situation repeats with slight variation, the viewer begins to sense an underlying structure—not so much a narrative structure as an affective one. How emotion is induced, how it is exhausted, and how it is rearranged: Fennell pursues this process with an almost experimental rigor.
This poetics of repetition operates with even greater precision on the visual plane. The pastel palette is not merely a stylistic choice but a method of externalizing feeling. It strips away depth, flattening everything into immediate sensation. Yet it is precisely this flatness that creates the condition for rupture. In a world without depth, emotion becomes volatile, capable of sudden reversal. Pleasure turns quickly into discomfort; allure slips into revulsion. These abrupt transitions arise less from narrative logic than from the texture of the image itself. The frame does not explain the character; instead, it overdetermines the sensory environment in which the character is placed, effectively instructing the viewer what that character ought to feel.
By the time we arrive at Saltburn, this politics of sensation assumes a more overt form. Space is no longer a neutral backdrop; it is desire made material. The camera does not simply record this space—it indulges in it. It glides across surfaces, lingering on texture, light, and ornamental excess with almost obsessive attention. Yet this indulgence is never entirely comfortable. The more beauty is intensified, the more it tends toward self-destruction. Pleasure ceases to exist as a pure sensation and emerges instead as the byproduct of excess. And excess, inevitably, anticipates its own collapse.
At this point, Fennell’s cinema reveals its subtle appropriation of genre. Familiar narrative frameworks—revenge, desire, ascent—seem to offer the viewer a stable interpretive grid. But that grid gradually deforms from within. Before any decisive event takes place, emotion has already shifted elsewhere. The viewer becomes aware, belatedly, of what they had expected to see. This delay is not simply a twist; it is a mechanism that exposes the failure of perception itself. We believe we are following a story, only to realize that we have been carried along by a flow of sensation.
Such manipulation of affect is deeply entangled with the question of the gaze. The classical inquiry—who looks at whom—expands here into something more elusive: what is being arranged to be seen, and what affective assumptions are embedded in that arrangement. If Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze articulated the distribution of power and desire, Fennell’s work demonstrates how that distribution is packaged as sensory pleasure. The viewer consumes the image while simultaneously aligning with the emotion it prescribes. In that moment of alignment, ethical judgment is suspended.
Ultimately, Fennell’s films do not so much deliver a message as expose the conditions under which a message comes into being. Emotion is not something that arises naturally; it is produced through specific visual and rhythmic configurations. And those configurations remain perpetually unstable, always susceptible to reorientation. This instability is not merely a matter of style but a mode of perceiving the world.
The bubbles in the champagne glass finally reach the surface and burst. In that instant, it becomes impossible to determine whether what we have witnessed is an image of ascent or of dissolution. What remains in Fennell’s cinema is precisely this ambiguous residue. Sensation continues to shimmer, but its shimmer is no longer innocent. It is light that has already passed through a fracture.
— The Cinematic Visionaries
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