There is self-awareness, and then there is the high-drama, über-kitsch, grotesquely overprivileged cinematic universe of Emerald Fennell. The Oscar-winning screenwriter and director of Promising Young Woman takes “write what you know” and runs with it, sets it on fire and dances in the ashes with the ridiculous Saltburn, opening this year’s BFI London Film Festival. The DNA of The Talented Mr Ripley courses through Fennell’s second feature, leaving the righteous girls of her corrosive debut behind for a story about boys and their toys: the rich, desperate, horny and horribly destructive ones. Barry Keoghan – nominated for an Oscar for The Banshees of Inisherin and recently seen in Top Boy – leads the fable as Oliver Quick, a working-class Oxford fresher who notices the impossibly handsome and equally as rich Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, decidedly 2023’s big screen golden boy) and realises he has to have him. To know him, to be with him. His life depends on it.