Saltburn Explained- The Two Bathtub Scenes Reveal Everything You Need To Know About Oliver

Never has there been such deliciously wicked nonsense as Saltburn. Emerald Fennell’s eat-the-rich tale is a satisfying and often disgusting look at interlopers, banal elite ignorance, and ambitious greed. The Barry Keoghan(Banshees of Inisherin) showcaser lets home demonstrate why he is one of the best actors working. He is calculating, vulnerable, fragile, and deadly in equal measures. You don’t know which Oliver is the real one until the final moment, when everything is revealed and the extent of his psychosis is laid bare. Oliver is as monstrous as the wealthy dilettantes he wants to consume.

Summary:

• Oliver is an interloping nightmare who couldn’t understand the difference between loving and having someone.
• The two bathtub scenes are vital to understanding Oliver and his motivations.
• Oliver’s long-term plan is explained.

Oliver is a psychic vampire.

Throughout Saltburn, Oliver lies and licks at the boots of his friend and his family. At first, he does it to be around Felix and later to become Felix. He desperately wants to be part of their world and have a slice of it for himself; he will sacrifice anyone and anything to keep it. Like What We Do In The Shadows marvelously dull Colin Robinson, Oliver sucks the life out of everyone he becomes obsessed with. He does it unintentionally initially, but eventually, he does it to protect himself.

After Felix finds out that Oliver’s parents are good, caring people and not drug dealers and addicts, he is furious. Understandably, he is angry that Oliver lied to him about everything. Oliver tries apologizing and convincing him that their friendship wasn’t a lie, even if almost everything else was. In many ways, Oliver actually believes what he tells Felix. When Felix rejected Oliver, Oliver felt he had no choice but to kill him. If he couldn’t have him, no one else could either. Oliver did love him, but only so much as anyone can love a thing. He wanted to possess him, to be him, to consume him. Oliver didn’t really care to be loved back by him because he didn’t know what that meant.

Farleigh Start(Midsommar’s Archie Madekwe) is one of the few who sees Oliver for what he is. Oliver is a manipulator, a leech, a consumer, and a jealous fanboy. Farleigh confronts him the night Felix dies and reminds him that he will never belong there. Players recognize game, and he knows what Oliver has been doing all along, even if he doesn’t realize the full extent of his deception. Not only did Oliver manage to eliminate Felix, who knew the truth about him, but Felix’s death gave Oliver the perfect way to get rid of Farleigh. Oliver intimated that the drugs Farleigh brought had something to do with his death.

Ventia realizes too late as well that Oliver is dangerous. She accuses him of scheming and reminds him that he will never belong there. Ventia sees the danger they are all in from Oliver, but she nor any of them were equipped to handle Oliver. Almost clairvoyantly, she predicts that he will “eat them from the inside out.” That is what vampires do. They eat their prey from the inside out, leaving them a husk of what they once were.

She sees that he is a bad person, and yet her own destructive desire prompts her to kiss him. The parallel themes of love and hate are shown here. She is disgusted with him but more disgusted with herself for not being strong enough to resist him, to begin with. Whether Oliver killed her or simply put her in a position to kill herself, we don’t know, but he definitely orchestrated her death just as he did Felix’s. It is implied, however, that he probably killed her.

So much of the horror from Saltburn comes from the absurdity of these vile victim’s behavior. When Felix is discovered dead, his parents carry on with lunch as if nothing has happened. Farleigh and Ventia are shaken to their core, and their house manager is concerned, but James and Elspeth are cold. Oliver believes he is owed the house and their lives because the Cattons don’t deserve it. After Felix and Ventia rejected him, Oliver became obsessed with consuming their lives. He got rid of everyone one by one until the house and their wealth were his.

Why those two bathtub scenes in Saltburn are important

Oliver’s slurping of Felix’s bathwater containing his ejaculate, as well as the bizarre need to perform what can only be described as a sex act on Felix’s freshly dug grave, shows the extreme level of his obsession with first Felix and later everything that he had including Saltburn. It is more proof that Oliver was a societal vampire. He tells as much to Ventia when he was performing oral sex on her while she was having her period. He says it like a joke, but the truth is always right there. It wasn’t enough to have Felix like him. Likewise, it wasn’t enough to be around him. Oliver needed Felix to be obsessed with him just as he was obsessed with him. That would never happen, as Oliver didn’t understand what love was and would always be a jealous liar.

Oliver drank Felix’s water because he wanted a piece of him inside of him. He probably believed by ingesting any piece of him, he could become him. It is the first real clue that although Oliver thinks he loves Felix, he doesn’t. He wants to have Felix and become Felix.

The second bathtub scene strips bare any pretense about who and what Oliver really is. Even before we knew just how sociopathic Oliver was, he was cruel to Ventia. Their exchange leaves no doubt that Oliver is a monster. He pushes and prods at Ventia, knowing she is fragile. When she ridiculed him and called him a moth, he snapped. He may not have gone into the bathroom intending to kill her, but when she made fun of him, he decided she would not be able to deliver what he wanted. If she had gone along with the ruse, she might have ended up like Elspeth later down the road.

The ending of Saltburn

After Ventia and Felix’s death, Oliver tries to stay at Saltburn but is sent away by James with a large sum of money. A few years later, he meets Elsbeth again, who tells him her husband is dead, and they strike up a friendship again. Flash forward to sometime later, and she had an accident or a debilitating disease and is now on her deathbed. Before that, she left the house to Oliver, and as she lies completely powerless, he taunts her. Everything that Oliver manipulated, everything that happened with Felix over the flat bike tire, his poor act at the bar, all of the lies he told about his family, and the three Catton deaths were all pieces to this puzzle.

Oliver dances naked through the halls of Saltburn because he has no respect for the people that formerly lived there, and this is his way of claiming his prize and sticking it to the morons that made it easy for him. Victory is finally his. I wonder how long he can. Surely, someone will want to investigate Elspeth’s death, and Duncan suspects Oliver is an opportunist.

Was this Oliver’s plan all along?

It’s doubtful that his plan from the beginning was to take Saltburn. Likely, he was honest about his love for Felix. Oliver couldn’t, however, recognize real love and from obsession. He wanted to have Felix need him the same way he needed Felix. His original plan was to probably make Felix love him by hanging around him.

Later, when he determined Felix was never going would never he wanted, he shifted to Ventia, who was more damaged than Oliver wished to deal with. He also was still in love with Felix, and as a result, their relationship was never going to go anywhere. When Felix found out, Oliver lied about everything, his fate was sealed. From then on, Oliver shifted his obsession to revenge and consumption of everything the Cattons had. When James sent him away, he turned all his attention to taking everything else from them.

It’s a thin line between love and hate. Love can lift us up or cause such intense self-loathing that it destroys us. In Oliver’s case, he loved the Cattons to death. Saltburn is currently streaming on Prime Video.