Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
1976 · Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Original language: Italian
- horror
- drama
The story
Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.
What it’s like
Cold, geometric and clinical: long static tableaux framed with the rigid symmetry of a stately villa, flat daylight and sickly fluorescent interiors, muted ochres and grey-greens that feel drained of warmth. The camera holds still and watches, rarely cutting away, so that cruelty is staged like a museum display and the banal domestic routines around it become their own kind of dread. Sound is sparse and wrong: scraps of Italian dialogue, a whistled tune, long stretches of uneasy silence, and piano or organ fragments that arrive like mockery. The pacing is slow, ritualised and oppressive, built around the four libertines' cold, systematic logic and the ordered sequence of their "stories." Its register is bleak, contemptuous and deliberately airless, with no catharsis, no relief and no redemptive arc; the victims are reduced to objects in a power structure the film refuses to soften. Intensity is extreme: explicit sexual abuse, sadistic physical and psychological torture, coprophagia, nudity and graphic cruelty, with much of the worst conveyed through restrained framing and implication rather than gore. This is not gentle or comforting in any sense. It is for viewers seeking an uncompromising, austere work of political provocation and transgressive art cinema, who can sit through severe material as a critique of fascism, power and consumption.
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