Its removal marks Felix’s increased conservatism while at home. It’s a moment that feels homophobic-coded, like Elsbeth understands what the stud reflects about Felix’s spontaneity and worries it could also signal queerness. The eyebrow stud has to come out, Felix explains to Oliver, because his mother Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) thinks it’s unhygienic. So when Felix removes the piercing at his family estate, Saltburn, where he’s invited Oliver to spend his vacation, its absence is the first chink in the fantasy that Oliver imagined about their future. As long as the piercing is present, so too is the possibility of something happening between Felix and Oliver - on the stone bridge they visit together in the middle of the night, or in Felix’s air conditioner-less dorm room. Felix offers all of these to Oliver, and look, wouldn’t we all get the wrong idea? During those Oxford days, when Felix allows Oliver into the warm glow of his inner circle, he’s always wearing the eyebrow stud, and its presence becomes a teasing kind of promise. The first thing about Felix that hints at him being unrulier than expected - and smuttier and smugger, a destabilizing-ly hot combination which Saltburn amplifies by making Elordi lean on things a lot - is that eyebrow stud.Ĭonsider what an eyebrow stud accentuates: a raised eyebrow, which can be flirtatious a wink, to communicate a shared secret eye contact, an important pre-kiss step. He’s impossible to ignore (again, that height!) but also unassumingly cool, not as strait-laced as Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), his eventual best friend who falls in love with him, or as image-obsessed as his cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). He’s got the floppy, shaggy hair that every member of the Strokes had in 2006, the preppy-with-an-edge style of Vampire Weekend, and the left-ear hoop that boy-band members normalized for teens in the aughts. But because Felix is presented as the most popular first-year at Oxford, he serves as the film’s contemporaneous embodiment. Very little of the outside world makes its way into Saltburn, aside from the music of the time - including a singalong to the Killers’ “Mr. Saltburn begins at Oxford University in 2006, which syncs up with when director and writer Emerald Fennell studied English there. We’re all mortal, aren’t we? And we’re all weak before that eyebrow stud, and all the rakishness and nonconformity it suggests. It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much desire and so much madness for such a little thing! Yes, I’m paraphrasing what Boromir said about the One Ring, because I’m pretty sure Felix’s piercing has done similar damage on all our sexual psyches as that gold band did on Frodo’s sanity. Yet nothing tells you so clearly what you need to know about who Felix Catton is - his bad-boy affectations, his seeming sexual fluidity - as the little stud in his left eyebrow. His face, body, charm, and affluence make obsessive admirer Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) go feral, and costume designer Sophie Canale highlights all of Elordi’s mass so well that Oliver’s motivations are understandable, even if his methods are detestable.

A tiny pair of boxer shorts as he complains about the heat in his Oxford University dorm room, an open robe that exposes his chest while he lounges around his family’s estate, a tank top and Romeo + Juliet–inspired angel wings to show off his shoulders at a Shakespearen costume party. Jacob Elordi is a lot of man, and in Saltburn, his character, Felix Catton, often wears things that emphasize his bigness.

Photo: Courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios It’s a tiny detail that says more about his character than almost anything else: his rakishness and nonconformity, and a telling bit of artificiality.

Frodo costume