It was the semen in the bathwater scene that did it. The moment my mother cracked. There we were, two nights ago – mum, me, dad, in that order – wedged on the sofa watching Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s lavish country-house thriller that’s had the nation clutching its pearls over Christmas with its squirm-inducing “scenes of a sexual nature”.
One of the most talked-about sequences sees Barry Keoghan’s libidinous interloper Oliver Quick slurping dregs of bathwater from a drain, minutes after Jacob Elordi’s handsome aristo Felix Catton has pleasured himself in that very same tub. This was the exact moment my mum reached for her go-to awkward film prop, the newspaper, and began to fervently (and unconvincingly) read an article about interest rates. My dad seemed to be stunned into silence. All I could do was laugh. We’d been here before.