- Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Saltburn."
- The movie has had fans talking about that bathtub scene.
- Here is how director Emerald Fennell and her cast tackled the most shocking moments in "Saltburn."
"Saltburn" may have ruined graveyards for Barry Keoghan.
In the Emerald Fennell-directed movie, Keoghan plays seemingly poor Oxford student Oliver Quick, who is obsessed with his rich classmate, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). When Oliver is invited to spend the summer with Felix's wealthy family at their country estate, Saltburn, he quickly conspires to ingratiate himself with the Cattons.
Since the movie dropped on Amazon Prime Video over the holidays, fans on social media have been raving about its shocking, and graphic, sexually-charged scenes.
In one scene, Oliver strips naked and humps his former friend's grave. Yikes.
"I can't look at graves anymore the same way. Do you know what I mean?" Keoghan joked to Entertainment Weekly. "They won't allow me into graveyards actually. They'll see me coming. They'll be like, 'Nah, nah.' Especially if I arrive with no clothes on."
Here is just how Fennell, Keoghan, and the rest of the cast, pulled off the movie's wildest moments — including that bathtub scene.
Oliver's intimate moment in the bathtub was one of the first scenes Emerald Fennell came up with
One of the most talked about scenes in "Saltburn" is when Oliver spies on Felix masturbating in a bathtub, and then proceeds to consume his friend's dirty bathwater after Felix has left the room.
Fennell, who also wrote the screenplay for "Saltburn," told Entertainment Weekly that the scene establishes Oliver as an "unreliable narrator."
"It was a boy saying, 'I wasn't in love with him,' and that same boy licking the bottom of a bathtub," she said. "So that was the very center of the film for me, this kind of unreliable narrator, somebody who was clearly in the grips of extreme desire and who hasn't yet come to terms with it or who has had to find another way of coming to terms with it or explain it."
In another interview with Time, Fennell defended the scene, saying she finds it titillating.
"I don't think it's shocking; it's incredibly sexy," she said. "To me, the bathtub is just an incredibly erotic scene. It is all the things that something stirring should be, which is funny and intimate and shocking and revolting and unbelievably sexy."
To film the scene, the bathtub was sliced in half so that the camera, and viewers, could get into the tub with Keoghan, Fennell told Entertainment Weekly.
The director also said the tub was placed in the center of the bathroom because it's "designed to be watched."
"These houses are built for voyeurism because the staff need to be able to see but not be seen," she told Time. "There's such erotic tension to that but also kind of horror because you're being seen doing the wrong thing."
Meanwhile, Keoghan told The Ringer that he believes Oliver is "confused and lost" in the scene.
"The moment where he rubs his face along the plughole and wants to be in it, it's sort of like, 'I want to feel it, I want it to be part of me, I want it to change me,'" Keoghan said. "I don't think he knows what he's actually chasing."
Fennell says the oral sex scene between Oliver and Venetia is all about control
Later in the movie, Oliver turns his attention from Felix to his sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), and the pair have a moonlit tryst behind Felix's back.
After learning Venetia is a masochist with an eating disorder, Oliver seduces Venetia by performing oral sex on her while she is on her period.
Both Keoghan and Fennell believe that Oliver's actions are all about control.
"He's abusing her, and he's a master manipulator," Keoghan told The Ringer. "He wants to see how far he can take it: 'I own you. You're going to do what I say.'"
Fennell described the moment as a "vampire scene" in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
The director said Oliver is fully clothed in the scene, while Venetia is in a nightgown, to show who has the power.
"Actually, what he's doing is not just what she wants in order to manipulate her, but actually because it's gratifying to him, too, because I don't think he knows what he wants really," Fennell said.