emerald fennell

Paris, 14 July – The planet’s film critics have spent the past fortnight in a collective swoon over Emerald Fennell, a 38-year-old British polymath who appears to have cracked the algorithm for making audiences laugh, squirm, and question their moral compasses—all while wearing couture. From Cannes to Busan, from the Dolby Theatre to whatever windowless multiplex still operates in downtown Caracas, the name “Fennell” is now murmured with the hushed reverence typically reserved for war criminals who’ve learned to play the oboe.

For the uninitiated, Ms. Fennell is the Oscar-winning writer-director of Promising Young Woman and this year’s Venice-shocker Saltburn, a film that asks the timeless question: “What if Brideshead Revisited had been written by a TikTok-addicted demon?” Across five continents, cinephiles have emerged from screenings clutching pearls, popcorn, and, in some cases, their passports—unsure whether to applaud or flee the jurisdiction.

The global implications are, like most things involving the British upper-middle class, simultaneously negligible and wildly overanalysed. China’s state censors trimmed Saltburn by four minutes, presumably removing the bits where anyone enjoys themselves. Meanwhile, in Argentina, President Milei’s office issued a statement praising the film’s “libertarian critique of aristocratic excess,” proving once again that auteurs can be co-opted faster than you can say “Che Guevara T-shirt at Coachella.”

Fennell herself—Cambridge-educated, former show-runner of Killing Eve, occasional actress in The Crown—has become a Rorschach test for national anxieties. In Berlin, critics hail her as a feminist Agatha Christie with a Spotify Premium account. In Tokyo, she’s marketed as “British Euphoria with worse weather.” And in Los Angeles, studio executives simply ask, “Can she direct superhero IP?”—a question that haunts every auteur like a hereditary disease.

What makes Fennell internationally exportable is her unerring instinct for the universal: revenge fantasies, class resentment, and the comforting lie that beautiful people suffer more exquisitely. Saltburn’s baroque mansions and candlelit orgies translate seamlessly from Oxfordshire to Ohio; after all, tasteless wealth looks the same in any language. The film’s true horror lies not in blood or bacchanalia but in the creeping realisation that, given the opportunity, most viewers would absolutely shag their way into an inheritance too.

This is why UNESCO, in a fit of bureaucratic delirium, recently added “Fennellian Irony” to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, somewhere between Ukrainian borscht and camel racing. The citation praised her “ability to weaponise charm against the viewer,” a phrase that doubles as a fair description of British foreign policy since 1815.

Of course, cynics note that Fennell’s ascent coincides with the streaming wars’ desperate hunt for edgy content that can be dubbed into 37 languages without losing its teeth. Amazon, Netflix, and the House of Saud’s media arm have all unfurled blank cheques, proving that even moral ambiguity has a price—usually around $15 million per episode, plus backend.

Yet beneath the glib global froth lies a more unsettling truth: Fennell’s films are successful because they confirm what we already suspect about ourselves. Given the chance, we would all like to be both victims and perpetrators, to suffer exquisitely and dine in candlelit halls while someone else scrubs the blood off the Aubusson. The international box office receipts merely quantify that collective self-knowledge, like a particularly stylish lie-detector test.

So, as the summer festival circuit continues its gilded carousel—Toronto next, then Zurich, then a gala in Riyadh where alcohol is banned but moral compromise flows freely—Emerald Fennell remains the woman of the hour. Somewhere in a climate-controlled vault, her next script is already being translated into Mandarin, Spanish, and whatever language Elon Musk invents for Mars. The world will watch, wince, and secretly delight in the spectacle of its own hypocrisy, beautifully lit by an Oscar-winning cinematographer.

There is, after all, no revenge like global distribution.