Warning: Spoilers for Saltburn follow.
Rosamund Pike is no stranger to subversive or disturbing movies.
Though she gained fame for conventional roles in James Bond and Pride & Prejudice, we will not soon forget the incomparable David Fincher film Gone Girl. Pike’s performance of Amy Elliot Dunne was the epitome of gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss in 2014. Faking her own death and pinning it on her cheating husband were just some of the many crimes perpetuated in the film. But now, it seems that Saltburn is giving Gone Girl a run for its money.
The follow-up to Emerald Fennell’s devastating indictment on rape culture, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn pushes the envelope. Set in the glossy world of 2007 Oxford, Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick is an outcast. Maligned by his snobby classmates because he is a scholarship student, he quickly becomes enamored with his desirable and doomed classmate, Felix (Jacob Elordi). The two become friends, leading Felix to invite Oliver to the grand titular estate where his family resides. What commences is a psycho-sexual journey down the rabbit hole where it isn’t clear who is good and who is evil. (Is anyone really good in this film?)
If watching Saltburn made you uncomfortable, you’re not the only one. Even Pike, in the role of Elspeth, Felix’s mother, felt the film’s heaviness.
Saltburn made Rosamund Pike uncomfortable
If you know, you know. Several sequences of Saltburn dare the viewers to look away from some obscene visuals. But the film is so captivating that it forces the audience to remain present. Pike was aware of this fact, seemingly off the bat, as she told Deadline.
“Linus [Sandgren], our wonderful cinematographer, would show us photographs from the day before. And some of them you’d think, ‘My god, what is that? That’s somebody’s bottom, or some really intimate part of the body!’ And it would actually only be a shoulder. But it was the way it was looked at, the gaze was so erotic and so intimate and uncomfortable that you kept thinking you were looking at something more shocking sometimes than you actually were.”
The infamous drain scene is one of the first sequences that comes to mind. But Pike was also disturbed by watching her character on screen. The Pride & Prejudice actress shared with the publication how the English aristocracy makes everyone feel out of place. Slightly different from American East Coast elitism, the English put on an air of not caring about anything while at the same time enforcing arbitrary rules. If broken, these rules make you an outcast. Elspeth plays this up in spades, from correcting Oliver’s breakfast etiquette to her disinterest in her Poor Dear Pamela’s (Carey Mulligan) death. She is about as reprehensible as anyone else, which Pike seems to agree with.
“I remember being very uncomfortable when I first saw the film. I couldn’t really watch myself at all. I hated how I found it uncomfortable the way Elspeth was… I don’t know quite what it was, I was made to feel quite uncomfortable. I think the camera is so personal, the lens is so close and you really see everything.”
The visceral visuals were even more shocking because some were absent in the script. Pike said that Fennell would casually write scenes after the fact, such as the intimate scene between Oliver and Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). And while Pike had trouble with watching herself, she never denied Fennell’s legendary talent at pushing these boundaries. Saltburn raises the bar for societal commentary and even the director’s previous work.
Saltburn is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.