Emerald Fennell’s scandalous satire Saltburn has had people talking ever since it hit theaters back in November 2023. (The film arrived on streaming just in time for Christmas and you can now watch it at home with an Amazon Prime subscription.)
From that Saltburn‘s iconic bathtub scene to that graveyard grind session and that shocking ending (more on that in a bit!), the psychological thriller starring Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi captured much attention and garnered many headlines for its provocative plot points.
One such scene is, of course, the now-famous nude dance that Koeghan’s Oliver Quick—an Oxford University student who becomes obsessed with a fellow pupil, Felix Catton (Elordi), and comes to stay with him and his aristocratic family at their sprawling estate for the summer—performs at the film’s end, after he’s taken down the whole Catton clan and christened himself the master of Saltburn mansion. Fennell discussed Oliver’s unclothed jig (and, no, that was no body double for Keoghan) during a recent interview with TheWrap:
The film, it’s a fairy tale. I never really make things that aren’t. And the way it’s filmed gives us a sense of that. For those people who were still doubting whether they should be on Oliver’s side or whether he was our hero, the ending needed to have so much triumph, so much evil glee. It needed to be an act of territory-taking and desecration and joy, but then it ends, of course, with solitude. My preoccupation is making an audience complicit, making them laugh when they shouldn’t maybe be laughing, making them squirm or feel complicated feelings. So the end needed to have that thing where you could not help but to be on Oliver’s side.
The director continued by saying that the “complicated feelings” that the audience has for the character of Oliver and his very questionable actions are the direct result of “Barry’s beautiful work” in the film. (The Dublin-born actor recently scored a 2024 Golden Globe nomination in the Best Actor category for Saltburn, but lost to fellow Irishman Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer.)
It’s a credit to Barry’s beautiful work—and everyone’s beautiful work—in that scene because there are so few people who leave the movie or come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Oh, I wanted him to get his comeuppance!’ [They’re] like, ‘Go get it.’ And that’s what I wanted. I wanted everyone to leave [the cinema] and be like [sucks in breath], ‘Ah. Oooh.’
Fennell directed the similarly controversial Promising Young Woman—in which Carrie Mulligan stars as said woman who avenges the assault of her best friend by righting the wrongs of crooked men—so the actress-filmmaker is no stranger to stirring up a little scandal. She tells TheWrap that she welcomes audience reactions to her films, whether they’re positive or otherwise:
Everyone’s reaction is different. There are moments when some people are gasping, some people are laughing, some people are shushing, some people are turned on, some people are angry, some people are bored, some people, whatever. There’s a moment in both of the films where the audience starts to turn on itself. Some people are like, ‘I can’t f—ing believe that these squares are so shocked by this,’ or like, you know, ‘I’m gonna leave, this is disgusting.’ And so when you come out of a movie like that, you’re not just talking about the movie, you’re talking about yourself. It was the same with ‘Promising Young Woman.’
Scandalous or not, Fennell’s flick is a hit both with viewers—enough folks tuned into Keoghan’s naked dance that Saltburn was one of Prime Video’s top 10 worldwide film debuts, per Deadline—and critics. The movie is up for Best Picture, Best Cinematography and Best Production Design at this Sunday’s Critics Choice Awards.