I saw this one last night, and I join most of you when you say W T F of a movie. There are pleasant moments, but Emerald definitely upped the shock value with the bathtub, menstrual period and fucking the graveyard scenes. mean, I get it, Oliver is a freaking pyscho, but sometimes it went too far for me. The revelation to Felix that Oliver was a big fat liar all along was the most effective of them all re: Oliver’s insanity.
I still don’t get Oliver’s motivation and maybe that’s why it’s hard to sympathize or even understand him at the end. I get the parallels to Parasite a bit, but at least there, even with the fall of the con, you sympathize with the poor father that he will never get out of the self-imposed prison for the rest of his life. There’s no triumph in Oliver’s final dance. Or maybe that’s how it was intended.
My understanding of Elspeth’s eventual demise was that Oliver slowly poisoned her over time, so that it’s not too obvious that she died so suddenly right when he came back to her life. At least that’s how I get it when he said “I have loved taking care of you all this time…”
That stone throw by Oliver of his dad’s death was a nice touch, I will admit. In hindsight, seeing that the stone didn’t go to the bottom of the stream and instead just went to the side, and didn’t go under water was foreboding of his dad’s non-death. The ambivalence of whether Oliver deliberately threw that stone to the side and not in the water, because he knew he was lying about his dad’s death was good writing on the part of Emerald.
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