Writing Analysis
Did You Miss This Surprising Symbol in “Saltburn”?
I’ve been fortunate enough to travel the world, and one of the most miraculous things I saw, something I couldn’t believe I was staring at, was Michelangelo’s Pietà.
The status shows a young Mother Mary cradling the body of a crucified Christ in her lap. Carved out of marble, the statue feels more like a pause at the top of a breath. Mary’s robes are mid-flutter, Christ still seems warm, and more than anything, you can feel the tenderness and grief, the sage acceptance of a mother who’s just lost her son.
No wonder Saltburn chose to bastardize it.
(Spoilers ahead.)
Saltburn is like a one-man Parasite: Ollie infiltrates an insanely rich family and eventually takes their literal castle for himself. First, he befriends Felix Catton, his top-of-the-food-chain classmate at Oxford. Felix invites him to stay at his family’s residence, Saltburn, for the summer, where Ollie meets Venetia, Elspeth, and Sir James, who are Felix’s sister, mother, and father, respectively. Also staying with them is Farleigh, fellow classmate and Felix’s cousin.
Ollie kills them off one by one. After poisoning Felix and staging it as a drug overdose, he effectively “kills” Farleigh by implying he’s responsible for Felix’s death, after which Felix’s parents disown their nephew once and for all. Then, Ollie kills Venetia, staging it as a suicide in the bathtub. He doesn’t kill Sir James but rather waits him out, then courts Elspeth before killing her.
In every murder (including the figurative murder of Farleigh), Director Emerald Fennell evokes a particular image: the sign of the cross, with Ollie upright, and his victims lying down.
This is the Pietà — but inverted (or rotated, if you will).
The Pietà (depicted above) forms the shape of a cross, with Mary, upright, forming the vertical axis, and Jesus, lying, forming the horizontal axis. (Art historians have said the Pietà also makes the shape of a pyramid, with Mary’s wide clothing forming the base, Christ the middle, and Mary’s head the peak.)
In Saltburn, we see this Pietà, this cross, four times — but inverted. In all instances, it is Ollie who forms the vertical axis, with his victims lying down, pinned beneath him.
First, he kneels on Felix’s grave before f*cking it/him. Then, he kneels next to the bathtub while Venetia lies inside it. From a later shot we know she died before bleeding out (the bathwater wasn’t stained red yet), so presumably Ollie drowned her before slitting her wrists to make it look like a suicide. With Farleigh, we see this inverted Pietà much earlier, when Ollie straddles and f*cks him. He may not have managed to figuratively “kill” Farleigh that night (by sending an e-mail from Farleigh’s phone that made it seem like he was trying to sell off some of the Catton’s property), but that incident tarnished Farleigh’s reputation enough that it was easier to eventually pin Felix’s death on Farleigh. Finally, Ollie straddles a vegetative Elspeth while ripping a plastic tube out of her esophagus and removing the nasal cannula that helps her breathe.
In the Pietà, the vertical axis is formed by the ultimate caregiver, Mother Mary. In Saltburn, Ollie is not the care giver, but the recipient. He is the usurper, biting the hand that feeds him and pays his rent (as the Pet Shop Boys song goes).
In the Pietà, the horizontal axis is formed by the ultimate victim, sacrifice, and savior, Jesus Christ. In Saltburn, the horizontal axes are similarly formed by sacrificial victims, but we wouldn’t necessarily think of them as saviors of anyone other than Ollie. As Ollie says, they’re apex predators who have had their world turned upside down because they never thought to look for predators.
This inverted Pietà also inverts the meaning of the original: it is not a symbol of care, but of destruction, not love, but something worse. “Hate” doesn’t quite seem to encapsulate the feeling. Neither do “resentment” or “envy.” Perhaps the right word is “Satanic.”
Ollie is pictured upside-down several times: in a reflection on the dining table, in a reflection on the lake. It’s not just a sign foreshadowing that he’ll turn Saltburn upside-down. Together with the choral soundtrack, the zoom-ins of the cross on Felix’s grave, and the references to a church service, it’s clear that one of the themes or motifs of Saltburn is Christianity, or at least Christian imagery.
The Cross of Saint Peter is an upside-down cross. Named after Jesus’s disciple who was crucified upside-down, the cross has since been adopted as occult imagery, making an appearance in Rosemary’s Baby and metal band Black Sabbath’s first album. Similarly, the inverted pentagram is widely accepted as a sign of the occult and has even been adopted as the sign of the Church of Satan.
Upside-down-ness has been more widely applied in film to represent the occult, or at least the dark. A possessed girl crawls(?) down the staircase upside-down in The Exorcist. Hereditary depicts a possessed girl banging her head on the ceiling while hanging upside-down, and it also employs shots that are simply flipped so that she appears upside-down. The world of demogorgons in Stranger Things is literally called the Upside Down.
That’s not to say Ollie is literally Satan, but he does fit the bill of someone who looks like an angel — or at least innocuous — and turns out to be the opposite. Remember: Lucifer was an angel who tried to seize God’s glory for himself.
The color red ties Ollie closer to the concept of Satan. His room is red. The robe he wears — often during the scenes when he’s most powerful — is red. The blood he consumes from Venetia is red.
There’s also the references to a vampire: Ollie calls himself a vampire before eating out Venetia on her period, we get a close-up of his blood-stained mouth afterwards, and he acts like a parasite leeching off his hosts. His red robe might also be a nod to Count Dracula, who’s often depicted in a cloak with red lining. Dracula and Satan might not be far apart in concept: “Dracula” means “son of the devil,” and modern adaptations like Penny Dreadful have even depicted them as half-brothers.
Saltburn has been criticized for epitomizing style over substance, but critics seem to forget that a deft artist can provide both. Michelangelo’s Pietà is both gorgeous and inspiring, showcasing technical prowess while striking deep into our hearts. I’m not calling Emerald Fennell Michelangelo, but there’s a reason the internet is ablaze with Saltburn reactions and analyses, and I don’t think it’s mere shock value. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory second look to see Saltburn is rife with symbols and references.
