Emerald Fennell knew exactly how the vomit in the sink was supposed to look. The year is 2007 and the place is Oxford University—Fennell is graduating in one world, but her lead character Oliver Quick is just beginning in another. After her incendiary revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, the Oscar-winning writer and Oscar-nominated director flips the script towards something different and daring for her follow-up, Saltburn. It’s a story about boys and their toys, but arguably something just as personal and raw for Fennell (if only a little heightened).

“It’s all personal, isn’t it? No matter how much you want to get away from yourself, you never really can,” the filmmaker tells me of her trip down college-era memory lane (the best of Girls Aloud, The Cheeky Girls, MGMT and Bloc Party are all invited to the party) and deep into the psyche of anyone who has ever felt life-threatening yearning and obsession. (Basically, everyone.) “Whether or not [Saltburn is] about my time at Oxford, it’s more about my obsession and all of our obsessions with looking at things we want. The constant watching and endless voyeurism, the bottomless pit of voracious need and desire for people and their houses and their families.”

That bottomless pit is brought to life by Barry Keoghan as Oliver, an impossibly clever Northerner who longs for the life, magnetism and luxurious airs of his classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi, in a movie year seemingly made just for him). Oliver wrangles an invitation to spend the summer at Catton’s eponymous estate, the swanky, maze-riddled Saltburn, where everything unravels.

The filmmaker also acknowledges Catherine Breillat as something of an emotional compass, specifically one mantra from 1999’s Romance: “She says that sex isn’t between people, it’s actually between beauty and disgust. There has to be some element that is transgressive, slightly frightening.” In Saltburn, it’s impossible to not feel a little bit of that fear when stepping through the doors (gates? towers?) of the Cattons’ country home. Or when seeing the way Felix’s cousin Farleigh (a brilliantly intimidating Archie Madekwe) stares down Oliver like a lamb for the slaughter.

“Some of the characters in this film have a scary command over other people,” Fennell agrees, while acknowledging that the most beguiling such moments are stealthier. “There’s a huge, beautiful, warm charisma that somebody like Felix has, that you can see coming a mile off. And then there’s this other kind of nighttime thing. That is very different.” There’s more than just Felix for Oliver; Saltburn contains far more than the carnal attraction and sweet schoolboy romance that buoyed Elio (Timothée Chalamet’s breakout role) in Luca Guadagnino’s film.

Keoghan is mercurial and holds great menace in his stare. “I think of him almost like a silent actor or a Pinter actor, in that where he excels is in the moments of stillness and quiet,” says Fennell of Keoghan. “That’s where he has so much power over other characters and over us as the audience. And, crucially, he is absolutely gorgeous. Lighting him was a pleasure.”

Keoghan’s beauty, however, is really nothing next to the mansion in the country that is Saltburn itself. Felix’s family home for the summer is a sprawling estate that makes Wonderland look like a Wilko (Brits know) and promises to swallow you whole. Nobody speaks of the secrets in the walls. The place becomes more than a character, something spiritual that promises a threat only those who go there can really understand.

It’s here that the fun and the tragedy really begin—Fennell, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for her first film, writes jokes you feel somewhat cursed for laughing at (“I know it’s going well when the more dreadful it becomes the more people laugh,” she says). Her characters are drawn so vividly, you feel they just must be real—except it’s staggering to imagine any living, breathing person daring to say such things. When Felix lets slip about Oliver’s mother’s struggle with substance abuse, his own mother, Lady Elspeth Catton (a scene-stealing Rosamund Pike), tells her friend and longtime guest Pamela (Carey Mulligan) she had heard the dreadful news of these babies, like Oliver, being born drunk.

We Brits have indeed twisted our legitimate homegrown elegance into a cultural product of high-stakes manners, but that’s where viewers need to pay attention to Saltburn. “Watching it in England, people know it’s a comedy,” Fennell explains. “They immediately understand that it’s a satire, bombastic and over-the-top. It takes a little bit longer elsewhere… Because of the elegance, people assume it’s a serious thing.”

Saltburn opened this year’s BFI London Film Festival after receiving its world premiere at Telluride, and in London the laughs really landed. The film is plainly funny, until it’s plainly something else. Beautiful, no doubt, but also twisted and desperate: an offhand remark, an ill-fitting tuxedo, a stolen kiss, a life-altering lie.

Fennel might think of herself as a “silly billy”, but “sicko” is the label that’s sticking fast in Letterboxd reviews. She laughs her booming, room-filling and nerve-shattering laugh, before regaining composure, when she hears Hunter’s Letterboxd review: “This one is truly for the sickos. A bit too sick for my taste at times, but you sickos will love it.” The filmmaker says, “For me, the sicker it gets, the funnier it is.” (I agree, and so does Jenni Kaye in her perfect, spoiler-heavy review.) “I always feel like, aren’t we all sick? Is any of this really that bad? Is any of this worse than the sort of things people are typing in at three in the morning? Maybe I’m being facetious, but I don’t think there’s anything in this film that’s that sick, especially when I’ve been used to seeing women’s bodies treated abominably in film and television.”

On the heels of Promising Young Woman, but also the piercing Killing Eve, for which she was a showrunner and executive producer, Fennell knows. The fun is earned, and the sickness of it all really comes down to taste—and guts. Fennell has them. “We’re talking about a few little close-ups, you know? There are a couple of moments that are extra-Gothic, but there’s nothing in this film that isn’t honest about how we feel about people. There are so many people that we would eat alive, given half the chance.”