Let’s Talk About Duncan the Butler in Saltburn

This article was originally published on November 21. We are recirculating it now timed to Saltburn’s streaming debut on Prime Video. Be sure to also read Alison Willmore’s review of the film, our interviews with the bathtub scene’s foley artist and the final dance scene’s choreographer, and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.

Barry Keoghan’s devious, Dickensian-named first year gets the better of nearly everyone in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Keoghan plays Oxford University student Oliver Quick like a striving scorpion born of the suburbs, a Tom Ripley type with a wobblier moral compass, freakier seduction tactics, and a higher death count. He ingratiates himself into the aristocratic Catton family, first by befriending his very handsome and very tall classmate Felix (Jacob Elordi) and then sidling up to Felix’s lonely sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), his judgmental mother Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike), and his dandyish father Sir James (Richard E. Grant). Even Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), who looks down his nose at scholarship recipient Oliver, lets his guard down by sleeping with the guy. Oliver knows how to charm the upper class, and it’s with a mixture of sycophantism and gratitude. People on his own social level, though? They aren’t so easily swayed, and Saltburn’s most fascinating and underused character is Duncan, the butler who can sense Oliver’s wrongness from the beginning.

The dedicated-to-insiders and distrustful-to-outsiders servant is a core part of the manor-murder-mystery genre that helps inform Saltburn, and Paul Rhys’s Duncan is — from his first moment onscreen — a skeptical representative of upper-class traditions. When Oliver arrives at the Catton family estate, it’s the unimpressed Duncan who meets him at its palatial doors and chastises him for showing up early without giving the staff a heads-up. Felix tells Oliver to brush off Duncan’s stiff-upper-lip propriety, but that’s hard to do when Duncan is throwing side-eye at Oliver every time they’re in the same room: when Oliver incorrectly orders eggs at breakfast and makes a bit of a scene; when Oliver wanders into the home’s library and spends a little too much time peering at a miniature re-creation of Saltburn’s hedge maze, so intently that he doesn’t notice Duncan materializing behind him. “Lots of people get lost in Saltburn,” Duncan says to Oliver then, a line that feels like a warning — not to protect Oliver from the Cattons’ selfishness and frivolity, but to keep him from getting too comfortable in this place that’s far above his station.

Always lurking. MGM. Always lurking. MGM.

Of course, extremely comfortable in Saltburn is exactly what Oliver becomes once the film ends with him having wiped out all the Cattons, starting with Felix in that labyrinth, and then inheriting the estate from Elsbeth more than 15 years after his first visit. His final nude dance through the home to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” is meant to be a moment of triumph; Oliver is never more content than when he’s voguing and twirling through Saltburn’s ancient halls. (Admittedly, him slurping up Felix’s semen-filled bathwater is a close second.) But there’s a hollowness to the moment, too; all this time, Fennell’s been setting up consequences for Oliver through Duncan, only to abruptly disappear the butler from the film’s final act.

Before then, Duncan has seemingly been taking fastidious mental notes on all of Oliver’s mistakes and crossed boundaries, perhaps accumulating them as evidence of his unsuitability. Fennell makes sure to show Duncan lurking in corners throughout the film, right up until Felix’s funeral, when he holds an oversize umbrella for Felix’s grieving relatives. The character is shot so forebodingly that, years later, once Oliver has seized Saltburn for his own, you half-expect the butler to interrupt the younger man’s dance scene with an act of defensive violence on behalf of the estate he’s served his entire adult life — two members of the not-upper-crust fighting over who gets to be one of the chosen. Or maybe, during Oliver’s dance, we might’ve seen a brief shot of Duncan being forced to serve the young man he once sneered at so openly. That would be fun class-struggle stuff! But wiping Duncan off the board entirely is a missed opportunity for Fennell to more thoroughly explore the enmity that can breed and bloom between the haves and have-nots. The unblinkingly hard-eyed and wonderfully menacing Duncan getting (figuratively) lost in Saltburn isn’t thematic circularity; it’s Fennell sacrificing the film’s last opportunity for compelling conflict for the sake of a final set piece that’s as shallow as bathwater.