A New Movie Has the Most Head-Turning Sex Scenes in Years. Let Us Analyze Them in Detail.

In Sex Reviews, writers offer a sober critical assessment of the sex scenes in new films. This installment contains spoilers for Saltburn.

Saltburn, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, had been a big weird question mark on the year’s movie calendar, with its seeming tale of a young man (Barry Keoghan) and his increasingly overheated obsession with a college classmate (Jacob Elordi, of Euphoria infamy) against the backdrop of a country estate that looked like a sex-crazed upside-down Downton Abbey. Now that the movie is here, we’re sorry to say, it has landed with a bit of a thud: Both critics and theater audiences largely turned up their noses at it. But Saltburn still seems destined to have a long and prosperous life in streaming land, if for no other reason than it contains some of the most head-turning mainstream sex scenes since a teenager picked up a peach in Call Me by Your Name. What’s this about the longest nude scene for a major actor in memory? And, uh, what happens with bathwater? Below, the Sex Reviews crew bravely evaluates all that and more.

Jeffrey Bloomer: We are at Oxford, and we have gathered that Oliver (Keoghan) is desperately trying to make friends with Felix (Elordi), who seems to take pity on him because Oliver is, as derisively noted by someone, a “scholarship student” and therefore a loser. The movie opens with a breathy soliloquy from Oliver about whether he loved Felix, or was in love with Felix, or something, all delivered ominously in the past tense. So it’s not a surprise when he trails him home with a young lady and watches them go at it.

Isabelle Kohn: Oliver is developing an obsession with Felix. I wasn’t exactly surprised either—you already know that if Barry Keoghan’s in a movie, he’s going to be perverted. Still, it demonstrates two things. First: Felix will always be a little out of reach for Oliver. Second: Oliver’s kinda kinky.

Jeffrey: “Kinda kinky” perhaps undersells what’s to come, but we’ll get to that shortly. Elordi is parading around in an eyebrow ring (this is a period piece set in … 2006??) and I appreciated that Emerald Fennell’s libidinous camera ogles his every move, but even so, this scene is pretty mild compared to …

Jeffrey: We’re skipping ahead a decent bit. Felix has invited Oliver to his country estate for the summer, and Oliver is still watching. In this case, Felix is “giving himself a hand” in the bathtub, and Oliver eagerly watches him do it. After Felix finishes the deed and leaves, Oliver jumps in and laps up the last of the, uh, fortified bathwater with a kind of guttural slurp, backed up lovingly by the movie’s foley artists.

I found this scene totally unhinged and also delightful.

Isabelle: The weirdest thing about this scene isn’t that he drinks semen-splashed bathwater—it’s who he becomes after. The water seems to give him some sort of man mojo, and a sudden, unexplained flair for dominance and sadism. Oliver was just a noodly little sidekick with no backbone, but after he slurps the cum water, he transforms into the kinkiest, most manipulative freak you’ve ever seen.

Jeffrey: I think the movie shows its cards a little more here, but Oliver was already a freak. Our freak.

Isabelle: Another thing that stood out to me was Elordi’s incredibly textured skin and the camera’s fixation on his wet, bathwater-drenched ear and neck. A good day for nongenital body parts being hot.

Jeffrey: Yes, the full camera-fucking Elordi and his every corner and cavity gets in this movie is really something. Like, sure, if I had the opportunity to train a camera on that guy’s armpit for a week, I’d probably do it too, but jeez. Anyway, great scene.

Jeffrey: Let it be said it’s been a good year for period sex on screen. Very positive period sex! There was also Fair Play, the Netflix movie where the guy eats his girlfriend out at a wedding and ends up with blood all over his tux, much to their apparent enjoyment. And now this seduction scene, in which Felix’s sister, Venetia, warns Oliver it’s her time of month, and Oliver tells her, “It’s lucky for you I’m a vampire.” He then, erm, collects some of the blood, eats a little of it, spreads it all over her, and goes down for a closer look. We then cut to his blood-smeared face back in the bath.

Isabelle: Controversial opinion here, but I thought this was kinda hot! Save for the fact that it made NO SENSE that she was just sitting outside in a see-through nightgown, free-bleeding with no tampon or pad while chain-smoking, it was really kinky and had a distinct, surprising moment of power exchange. Bravo to Oliver for taking note of Elspeth’s (these names!) earlier observation that Venetia was a masochist with bulimia, and using that information in an erotic way to draw her in. I didn’t know he had it in him!

I hated the vampire dialogue, though. Please don’t bring your Halloween talk to this period sex moment.

Jeffrey: I thought it was extremely funny. That was basically my reaction to every sex scene in this movie: I thought they were very funny in a way that seemed somewhat intended. But, yes, somehow, also kind of hot? I have to hand it to this movie, which has a kind of rotten core and lots of problems, but it really delivers where it counts!

Isabelle: [Deep, jagged sigh.]

Isabelle: Finally, something actually queer! And once again, something I … liked? I do not condone this from a consent standpoint, and Oliver’s intentions are not good here, but I kind of love the idea of taming your bully through sexual dominance? Please do not try at home.

Jeffrey: Yeah, so here we have Oliver confronting the conniving Farleigh—who is Felix’s American cousin or something—by straddling him in the middle of the night, seemingly getting him hard, and then … slipping Farleigh inside of him? All in a power play, because Farleigh is trying to get between him and Felix? Do I have this right?

Isabelle: I kind of like that it’s not really clear what Oliver is doing to Farleigh sexually. He spits on his hand and reaches down at some point, which gives you a faint clue, but you don’t see anything other than the silhouettes of their faces, so you’re left in the dark about what they’re doing. It’s obviously not about sex and more about power inversion—Farleigh typically holds the reins in their weird friendship, at least outwardly, and here, he’s sort of jelly in Oliver’s hands (literally?).

Jeffrey: It’s something!

Jeff: Felix is dead after an all-night party and buried in the ground. (Elordi’s track record for getting killed for being too much of a fuckboy in movies is STRONG.) And Oliver’s reaction to this is, naturally, to walk up to his fresh grave moments after the funeral and fuck the ground he rests in.

Isabelle: Iconic. I feel like the filmmakers created an entire fictional universe just so they could show this gross worm humping the grave of his friend in the rain. I can see meme accounts printing this on some sort of generationally appropriate T-shirt that Instagram will market to me and ship to me from a warehouse in China in 2–14 business days.

By the way, I don’t have a penis, so I can’t tell—would a pile of dirt feel good? A simple yes or no would suffice!

Jeff: I thought about this for perhaps longer than I should have, but my answer is: no.

Isabelle: The only way Oliver was ever going to get with Felix would have been if Felix ceased to exist and left no physical imprint behind other than a six-foot plot of earth (er, let’s be honest, six-foot-nine—that dude is tall). Annoyingly, this could have been the climax of the film, but there’s another 20-ish minutes of Oliver being Oliver before they’d let us have our lives back.

Jeff: I regrettably agree this scene is perfect and, once again, made me laugh so loud I got a text from my boyfriend from bed telling me to turn it down. Saltburn is sort of an unholy cross between The Talented Mr. Ripley, a Lifetime stranger-danger movie, and Call Me by Your Name, and you simply cannot deny that having sex with a grave is a bigger flex than jerking off with stone fruit.

Jeffrey: Once Oliver’s grand plan is revealed (it is beyond the scope of Sex Reviews to talk about how little sense it all makes, but yikes does it not make sense), he parades around a now-empty Saltburn and dances totally naked for quite some time. And it’s funny because earlier in the movie, they make a big deal about how hung Oliver is when they all get naked in a field. And in the end of the movie, you obviously see a fair amount of Barry Keoghan’s penis. And like … he is a bit of a shower, sure! But only a medium shower? A pretty normal if above average softie? Was this slightly crazy-making for you too?

Isabelle: Completely agree. It was completely unnecessary to make Oliver “hung”—what was the point of that? It never came up otherwise, and we could very clearly see that he was mid when his dick came out 3 million times later in the film. Like you said, he seems like a healthy average shower. But claims about his size do not add up, and I lost about five years of my life over it.

Jeffrey: To be clear, Barry Keoghan may be the most hung man in Hollywood. I hope he is. And I commend him for doing this scene sans prosthetics. But you cannot watch this dance and think about anything else!

Isabelle: I believe the convention here is to ask how horny this film made you. So, how horny did it make you, on a scale from 0–10?

Jeff: I don’t know, a 5? Sucker for a good armpit shot I guess. And it is honestly refreshing how ham these pretty famous actors go for the material.

Isabelle: I am a weird little freak myself, so I’m going to say 7. Don’t get me wrong: Oliver sucks and I hate him, but I actually thought the sex scenes were the best part of the movie! They drove the narrative and gave our protagonist a level of unexpected depth and intensity—they were the moments when we questioned whether we were on his side. We might not have seen his diabolical nature were it not exemplified through those incredibly tense moments he had alone with the other characters, and I don’t think he could have done anything sicker than to hump Felix’s grave near the end. It had to be sexual with this guy.

As someone who’s very familiar with kink, were these scenes great examples of consent and negotiation? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Nothing like that should ever happen in real life. But I found these scenes creative and hot in a not-exactly-sexual way—they were about power.

Jeff: I don’t know if I will ever drink Jacob Elordi’s bathwater, but this movie did make me think I should consider it. High praise in my book.