Saltburn Director Defends Barry Keoghan's Most Provocative Scene

Contains spoilers for "Saltburn"

If you've seen "Saltburn," you know which scene leaves audiences stunned about halfway through the film. Having been invited to spend time with his friend Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) at the family's wildly luxurious country home, Saltburn, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) takes his psychosexual obsession with Felix to a new and unsettling level. The two are sharing a bathroom at the estate, complete with an enormous bathtub, and one night, Oliver watches through an ajar door while Felix pleasures himself in the bath. It's what happens after the bath, though, that's so strange. Oliver heads over to the nearly-drained tub and presses his face to the drain itself, drinking what Felix has left behind and immersing himself in the little bathwater that remains.

Speaking with People Magazine, writer-director Emerald Fennell said that the scene is meant to be sexy — and that she truly believes it is. "What I'm saying with that scene," Fennell said, "is I think that scene is the sexiest thing I've ever seen in my life ... And I'm saying that anyone else is safe to feel that."

Essentially, Fennell wanted to push audiences to feel something completely new and fascinating, even if it repulses them in some way. "Did you feel something you've never felt before in a movie?" Fennell asked her rhetorical viewers. "[I]f that's the case, then the movie is effective, and it's worked, and that's what we wanted to do."

Oliver's obsession with Felix — and, by extension, the Catton family — is all-consuming, and his moment with the bathtub is the beginning of his journey as he sexually manipulates Felix's sister and cousin in order to infiltrate the Cattons. Still, it's his attraction to Felix that he keeps secret, and the bathtub is just the start. When Felix dies (we learn that he was poisoned by Oliver after the two have a friendship-ending fight), Oliver, overcome with lust, grief, or something in between, sobs at his grave, eventually making love to the freshly dug dirt before crying once again. It's through these scenes that Fennell illustrates, through Oliver, that he feels he wants to consume the Cattons, especially Felix — and if he can't have Felix, he'll simply take it all for himself.

"We wanted to present the feeling of that locust love: impossible, carnivorous, forever, impossible vampire love," Emerald Fennell said. "I think that that is what we did and every single person making this film did the most unbelievable job."

Fennell did say that not everyone's going to enjoy this admittedly extreme moment, but that anyone who does love it as much as she does will experience something truly special. "It's such a profound feeling of being seen — that all of us felt making it, actually," she said.

In an interview with both Emerald Fennell and Barry Keoghan at The Ringer about this shocking scene, Keoghan agreed with Fennell — he too thinks the scene is incredibly sexy. "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 says. "It's a total obsession. He's confused and lost. I don't think he knows what he's actually chasing."

After revealing that the bathtub moment was one of the first things she came up with while crafting "Saltburn," Fennell clarified exactly why Oliver does this at all: "It's the impulse. The moment he does that, it imbues him with this kind of wicked power. It also just felt, to me, so profoundly true of vulnerability, desire, and class envy: All of us can only ever really hope to lick the bottom of a bathtub. So there's something pathetic, funny, incredibly sexy, and incredibly real."

Oliver's dalliance with a soiled bathtub is, without question, one of the most transgressive moments in "Saltburn" — which is really saying something — and is also integral to Oliver's descent into cruelty as well as his eventual takeover of the Catton family. Whether or not you agree with Fennell and Keoghan, you'll have to admit that audiences will be discussing this wild scene for years to come.