Everyone talks about Saltburn‘s bathtub scene, but we really need to discuss that grave scene.
Saltburn took the world by storm in 2023. Now that it is available on Amazon Prime Video, everyone can bask in its glory. The movie follows less-than-average Oliver (Barry Keoghan), who befriends a charming rich kid, Felix (Jacob Elordi). Felix opens up the unhinged world of the wealthy to Oliver when he takes him to his house, a sprawling estate called Saltburn.
Major spoilers for Saltburn are ahead.
Oliver’s love and obsession with Felix drive the movie, and this all-consuming desire pushes Oliver to do increasingly unhinged things. It starts with changing his personality and story to become someone Felix would be drawn to. While at Saltburn, Oliver can’t get enough of Felix. Part of this can be seen in that infamous bathtub scene that had serious erotic tones to it.
Felix, trying to be a good friend who thinks he knows what’s best for people, breaks Oliver’s illusion. Unexpectedly, Felix takes Oliver to see Oliver’s mom. It reveals everything Oliver has told Felix is a complete lie.
Repulsed by Oliver, Felix says Oliver must leave Saltburn after the Midsummer Night’s Dream-themed birthday party planned for him. Wearing antlers and a hot suit, Oliver tries to make amends with Felix and prove that he is still his friend. Felix, wearing golden wings that I can’t get over, won’t listen to Oliver. The back and forth comes to a head in the Saltburn hedge maze. After the two almost kiss, Oliver gives Felix a bottle of alcohol to hold while he vomits. Oliver goes to bed, leaving Felix in the maze. The next morning, the family finds Felix dead. All of this leads up to the scene I can’t stop thinking about.
The wildly erotic and sad grave scene in Saltburn
After Felix’s funeral, the family leaves Oliver at the graveside. While they complete their family tradition of tossing a rock in the river with a deceased loved one’s name on it, Oliver is alone. He grapples with the heaviness of the situation. Felix, Oliver’s whole reason for living, is gone. Oliver becomes overwhelmed by his sadness and the weight of his loss. He’ll never be with Felix again. In the rain, Oliver weeps over the freshly filled grave. He removes his shirt and collapses onto the grave.
At first, he touches the dirt covering the grave of his beloved. His movements escalate to shoving his fingers into the dirt. The camera stays unflinchingly focused on Oliver as he pulls his pants down so he can push his more intimate parts into the dirt, as well. Somehow, that one act encapsulates love, loss, obsession, and extreme hopelessness. Because Oliver is played by Keoghan, it’s also a little hot.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Barry Keoghan and writer/director Emerald Fennell discussed the scene. At first, it was meant to stop at the fingering, but Fennell and Keoghan decided they needed to “unzip” for the scene to be right. Keoghan said, “For me, it wasn’t about fecking the grave, it was more about I don’t know what to do with this obsession; it’s making me confused and making me unhuman in a way. It was a total discovery for him, I think. And it was sad. It was very, very sad.”
As Fennell told BuzzFeed, the scene is something we’ve seen in Gothic literature before. Fennell took inspiration directly from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
“It is troubling, it’s about grief, it is about the horror of grief and the horror of love. It comes directly from the Gothic tradition because there’s a scene in Wuthering Heights, one of my favourite books of all time, where Heathcliff digs down to get to Cathy’s coffin and the subtext is very much to do a similar thing. So what we have in the film is not completely outlandish given the genre. So much of Oliver’s desire cannot be sated, what he really wants is not possible, and even in the end it’s not possible.”
All the sex scenes in Saltburn aren’t what I expected them to be. They boil down to be as much about power and obsession as they are about sex, and the grave scene stands out above the rest as something I won’t be able to forget.
(featured image: MGM)
