One Saltburn Moment Evoked 'Squeals' Behind The Scenes That Had To Be Edited Out
This article contains spoilers for "Saltburn."
Outside of Luca Guadagnino, nobody is making "vibes" movies like "Saltburn." Writer and director Emerald Fennell's follow-up to "Promising Young Woman" is just as provocative as her Oscar-winning feature directorial debut. The film is ostensibly a cross between "Brideshead Revisited" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" ("Brideshead" author Evelyn Waugh is even named-dropped at one point), following a student at the University of Oxford — one who goes by the Dickensian moniker of Oliver Quick, as played by Barry Keoghan — as he latches onto a rich, popular peer named Felix (Jacob Elordi). However, for all its high-art influences, "Saltburn" is much less interested in themes about wealth and Britain's crumbling aristocracy than it is in luxuriant close-ups of its characters' body hair or montages of people glistening with sweat as they gyrate, party, or merely lounge about half (or fully) naked.
"Saltburn," in other words, is a gratifyingly horny film, though there is one particularly salacious moment that has taken the internet by storm. The scene in question finds Oliver spying longfully on Felix as he performs the (ahem) five-knuckle shuffle while taking a bath. After Felix finishes polishing the banister, Oliver slinks into the bathroom and lustfully gulps up what remains of the protein-enriched tub water, even going so far as to rim the drain. This is the part where I ruin the mood by admitting this shot didn't quite land the same for me ... as I had only barely fished out a nasty mass of soap and hair from a shower drain right before I watched Fennell's film.
At the time, though, I can only imagine what it felt like to watch Keoghan sloppily slurp salty surprise on the set of "Saltburn." (That certainly puts the title in a new context.)
'Linus squealed like a little girl'
"Saltburn" was shot by Linus Sandgren, the same cinematographer responsible for the grainy textures of "American Hustle," the Technicolor razzle-dazzle of "La La Land," and that shot of an elephant pooping on the camera in "Babylon" (an underrated film worth seeking out, by the way). Together, he and Fennell conjure up some gloriously lush imagery in "Saltburn," not least of all during Oliver's bathwater hijinks. Fennell described Sandgren to Entertainment Weekly as "the most profoundly unshockable person" she's ever met, which only made his reaction to the tub scene all the more amusing.
"The Swedes are famously very ... they'll talk about anything. And when Barry started to rim the drain, Linus squealed like a little girl, and we had to edit it out, and he was like, 'F—,'" Fennell recalled, laughing. Far from being annoyed, this was exactly the response she wanted:
"That is the thing — if in the room on the monitor, you are all feeling like, 'Whoa, holy s—,' then it's the most exciting thing in the world. Because it's not just that something's incredibly sexy, or at least I think it is; it has an involuntary physical response actually, that even when you are not physically supposed to respond vocally because you're filming, you do that because it's something that you can't help but respond to. And it's those moments where you know that you are getting to something that is incredible."
To be sure, if Fennell needed confirmation this scene would hit the way she'd hoped, Sandgren's reaction must've been all the more encouragement for her to continue pushing the envelope with the film's libidinous shenanigans. What "Saltburn" lacks in deeper meaning, it makes up for in being an entrancing, beguiling experience.
"Saltburn" is now streaming on Prime Video.