Together (2025) — Love, Loss, and the Horror of Becoming One

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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Michael Shanks’ Together arrives draped in the familiar trappings of modern relationship horror: an isolated move, emotional fractures laid bare, and the suggestion that intimacy itself might be the most dangerous terrain of all. What distinguishes the film—at least initially—is its willingness to literalise emotional dependency through supernatural means, turning the language of co-dependence into something disturbingly corporeal.

The story centres on a couple already fraying at the edges, their relocation to the countryside framed less as fresh start than slow retreat. Shanks smartly uses the rural setting as an amplifier rather than a cause, isolating the pair in a space where grievances echo and silences grow heavy. When the supernatural intrusion arrives, it does not feel like an external threat so much as an acceleration of tensions already present. Love, here, is not broken—it is mutating.

At its best, Together is sharply observant about the quiet violences couples inflict on one another in the name of closeness. The film’s central conceit—an “extreme transformation” of love and flesh—is handled with a commitment to physical horror that aligns it with the recent wave of intimacy-as-body-horror cinema. Shanks stages these moments with an unflinching eye, allowing discomfort to linger rather than rushing toward release. The implication is clear: to merge completely is to erase boundaries, and erasure is rarely benign.

Where the film falters is in its balance between metaphor and mechanics. The supernatural rules remain hazy, and while ambiguity suits the emotional material, it occasionally undermines narrative momentum. There’s a sense that Together knows precisely what it wants to say about relationships, but struggles to sustain tension once its thesis has been made flesh. The final stretch, in particular, leans heavily on repetition, circling its ideas rather than deepening them.

Still, Shanks deserves credit for resisting easy catharsis. Together refuses to offer a clean moral or a redemptive escape hatch. Its vision of love is not romanticised nor outright condemned—it is presented as something dangerous precisely because it is so often mistaken for safety. The horror comes not from the supernatural encounter itself, but from the realisation that devotion, unchecked, can become a kind of possession.

The Prognosis:

Uneven but thoughtful, Together is a grim meditation on intimacy and identity, using body horror to expose the cost of losing oneself in another—even when the invitation sounds like love.

  • Saul Muerte

Keeper (2025) — Osgood Perkins and the Slow Bleed of Mythic Terror

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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Osgood Perkins has never been interested in horror as spectacle. His films drift, linger, and rot from the inside out, favouring mood over momentum and suggestion over shock. Keeper finds the director once again circling his most enduring fixations—the paranormal, the mythic, and the occult—and when he commits fully to these shadowy preoccupations, the results are among his most unsettling to date.

The premise is deceptively simple. Liz and Malcolm retreat to a secluded cabin for an anniversary weekend, a familiar setup that Perkins treats less as narrative engine than ritual initiation. When Malcolm abruptly returns to the city, the film fractures, leaving Liz alone in a space that begins to feel less like a holiday retreat and more like a consecrated site. What follows is not a barrage of scares but a slow accretion of dread, as the cabin reveals itself to be a vessel for something ancient, watchful, and profoundly uninterested in human morality.

Perkins’ greatest strength has always been his willingness to let horror breathe. Like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel, Keeper operates on a frequency closer to folklore than modern genre mechanics. The evil here is not noisy or demonstrative; it is embedded, inherited, and ritualistic. The cabin feels less haunted than kept—maintained by forces that predate Liz’s arrival and will endure long after she’s gone. Perkins paints this world with a vivid but restrained brush, using sound design, negative space, and repetition to suggest a cosmology that remains tantalisingly opaque.

Tatiana Maslany anchors the film with a performance of remarkable control. Isolated for much of the runtime, she carries Keeper through micro-expressions, physical tension, and an ever-shifting relationship to her surroundings. Her Liz is neither hysterical nor heroic; she is observant, increasingly wary, and quietly devastated as the rules of reality begin to slip. Maslany understands Perkins’ rhythms, allowing fear to register not as reaction but as recognition—an awareness that something has always been wrong here.

If the film falters, it’s in its refusal to fully sharpen its final act. Perkins’ devotion to ambiguity, while thematically consistent, occasionally blunts the emotional impact. There are moments where the mythology feels more gestured at than excavated, and viewers seeking narrative closure may find the ending frustratingly elusive. Yet this, too, feels intentional. Keeper is not about defeating evil or escaping it, but about realising one’s place within a larger, indifferent order.

In the context of Perkins’ body of work, Keeper stands as a confident reaffirmation of his obsessions. When he centres his stories on the occult and the mythic, he is capable of conjuring horror that feels timeless, intimate, and deeply unclean. This is a film that seeps rather than strikes, lingers rather than lunges.

The Prognosis:

A haunting, slow-burning descent into ritual and isolation, Keeper confirms Osgood Perkins as one of modern horror’s most singular—and uncompromising—voices.

  • Saul Muerte

The Strangers: Chapter 2 (2025) — When Survival Becomes Sequelitis

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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The Strangers was once terrifying precisely because it refused to explain itself. Masks without motive. Violence without catharsis. Bryan Bertino’s original film understood that randomness is the most unsettling horror of all. The Strangers: Chapter 2, directed by Renny Harlin, represents the franchise’s continued drift away from that ethos—an increasingly desperate attempt to stretch a concept built on nihilistic simplicity into an ongoing mythology it was never designed to sustain.

Picking up immediately after the events of Chapter 1, the film leans hard into continuation. Maya survived. That alone already strains the fatalistic purity of the original premise, but Chapter 2 doubles down: the Strangers are no longer abstract forces of intrusion, but pursuers with intent, persistence, and—most damagingly—narrative obligation. Survival, we’re told, was just the beginning. Unfortunately, so was the creative erosion.

Harlin, a director long associated with bombastic escalation (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger), approaches the material with a franchise mindset rather than a conceptual one. The result is a film that confuses momentum for menace. The stalking becomes repetitive, the violence procedural, and the sense of existential dread gives way to something closer to slasher mechanics. The masks are still there, but the mystery behind them has been hollowed out.

The film’s most baffling misstep arrives midway through with a moment so tonally deranged it threatens to derail the entire enterprise: Maya’s encounter with a boar, framed with portentous symbolism and played as some kind of primal omen. It’s a genuine what-the-hell-am-I-watching beat—the precise moment the film abandons any remaining psychological coherence and wanders off into horror non sequitur. What should have been stripped-back terror curdles into accidental surrealism, as if the film briefly mistakes itself for an arthouse allegory before snapping back to franchise obligation.

The latter half retreats into an even more familiar, and equally uninspired, space: the hospital. The nods to Halloween II are unmistakable—fluorescent corridors, wounded survivor, killer(s) returning to finish the job—but where Carpenter and Rosenthal used the setting to extend a nightmarish inevitability, Chapter 2 uses it as connective tissue. The hospital becomes less a space of vulnerability than a narrative checkpoint, a place where the franchise can pause, reset, and prepare itself for further chapters.

This is the core problem: The Strangers was never meant to be episodic. Its power lay in finality. In meaninglessness. In the suggestion that violence doesn’t continue because it must, but because it can. By forcing continuation, Chapter 2 drains the concept of its philosophical cruelty. The Strangers don’t feel inevitable anymore—they feel contractual.

By the time the film limps to its conclusion, it’s clear that the franchise is running on fumes. What was once cold, terrifying minimalism has become overextended, over-explained, and increasingly absurd. The boar may be the most obvious sign that the film has gone off the rails, but the real damage was done the moment The Strangers decided it needed chapters at all.

The Prognosis:

A sequel that mistakes persistence for purpose, and mythology for menace—proof that some doors, once closed, should stay that way.

  • Saul Muerte

The Home (2025) — Senility, Surveillance, and the Long Memory of Evil

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

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James DeMonaco has always been fascinated by systems—how they rot, how they fail, and how violence seeps through their cracks. From the blunt social allegory of The Purge to the leaner, meaner contours of his later work, DeMonaco’s cinema operates in a state of controlled paranoia, convinced that institutions are not safeguards but incubators. The Home feels like a natural extension of that worldview, a film obsessed with corridors, rules, and the slow revelation that something malignant is being politely maintained behind closed doors.

The premise is deceptively modest. A troubled drifter takes a job at a retirement home. The residents are strange. The caretakers are stranger. The fourth floor is forbidden. This is familiar territory—The Home traffics in the grammar of institutional horror—but DeMonaco filters it through a jittery, conspiratorial lens. The building is less a location than a system of concealment, its bland hallways buzzing with the low-grade menace of withheld information. Every locked door feels like a threat. Every smile reads as camouflage.

The film’s manic energy is largely carried by Pete Davidson, whose casting initially seems like provocation but gradually reveals a sharp, unsettling logic. Davidson plays the protagonist as a man permanently braced for impact, his body language twitchy, his eyes scanning for exits that may or may not exist. He weaponises his familiar cadences—half-joking, half-defensive—until they curdle into something desperate. This is Davidson stripped of irony, and while the performance is uneven, it is never uninteresting. His character’s foster-care trauma bleeds into the film’s institutional dread, turning the retirement home into a warped echo of the systems that failed him as a child.

DeMonaco leans hard into paranoia, sometimes to the film’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment. The Home is thick with suggestion—rituals half-glimpsed, whispers behind doors, glances held a second too long—but it often mistakes accumulation for escalation. The mystery coils inward, doubling back on itself, feeding the sense that the protagonist may be uncovering a conspiracy or simply unraveling under its weight. The film wants to exist in that uncertainty, but its third act can’t quite resist explanation, flattening some of the unease it works so diligently to cultivate.

Visually, the film is austere and oppressive. The retirement home is rendered as a liminal space where time has curdled—neither alive nor dead, neither nurturing nor openly hostile. DeMonaco’s camera prowls rather than observes, peering down hallways like it expects to be noticed. The forbidden fourth floor looms as an almost abstract concept, a vertical metaphor for buried memory and institutional secrecy that the film circles obsessively.

Yet for all its ambition, The Home struggles to fully reconcile its ideas. The social commentary—about neglect, aging, and the expendability of those who fall through institutional cracks—is present but underdeveloped. DeMonaco gestures toward something corrosive and systemic, but the film’s manic intensity sometimes drowns out its own argument. What remains is a mood piece that crackles with unease but lacks the narrative clarity to make its paranoia feel truly revelatory.

The Home is not a failure so much as an overextended diagnosis. It captures the sensation of discovering that the rules you trusted were never meant to protect you, but it can’t quite land the final indictment. Still, in its jittery energy, uneasy performance, and claustrophobic design, it offers a compelling if flawed entry in DeMonaco’s ongoing exploration of American institutions as haunted houses.

The Prognosis:

A film that trembles with suspicion and half-remembered trauma—unnerving in the moment, frustrating in retrospect, and never entirely at ease with its own revelations.

  • Saul Muerte

Wolf Blood (1925) — A Century Later, Still Howling for a Pulse

15 Monday Dec 2025

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One hundred years on, Wolf Blood remains less a horror film than a cinematic curiosity—an early brush with werewolf mythology that never commits to being a werewolf film, a thriller without thrills, and a relic overshadowed entirely by the genre giants that defined its era. Released in 1925, it limps into its centenary not as a pioneering milestone but as an instructive footnote in what not to do with burgeoning horror iconography.

It’s almost unfair, at first glance, to compare Wolf Blood to Nosferatu (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—but the comparison is inescapable. Murnau’s Nosferatu was already reshaping cinematic language, introducing expressionist shadows and spectral dread that embedded itself into the DNA of screen horror. Phantom, released the same year as Wolf Blood, showcased the artistry of Universal’s early macabre sensibilities, anchored by Lon Chaney’s transformative terror and lavish Gothic production design.

Wolf Blood, by contrast, feels timid and strangely uninterested in horror altogether. Where Nosferatu stalked its audience with plague-ridden menace, and Phantom delivered operatic Gothic spectacle, Wolf Blood spends a remarkable portion of its runtime on logging-camp melodrama, business rivalries, and a love triangle so tame it seems allergic to narrative urgency. The title promises lycanthropy; what it delivers is a medical transfusion and a man convinced—psychologically, never literally—that he may be turning into a wolf. No transformation, no bite, no curse. The supernatural is purely theoretical, and the film leans on dream sequences instead of embracing the monstrous.

In the 1920s, horror cinema was still defining its parameters, testing the boundaries of what images could frighten or disturb. Wolf Blood could have been part of that formative experimentation. Instead, it skirts away from genre entirely. Its werewolf premise is never realised; its mood never crosses into the uncanny; and its execution—flat staging, wandering pacing, and little sense of atmospheric danger—renders it a film that neither innovates nor entertains.

Even as proto-werewolf cinema, it is overshadowed by later, more robust entries (Werewolf of London in 1935 and The Wolf Man in 1941), which would properly codify the mythos that Wolf Blood only half-heartedly gestures toward. Its legacy, such as it is, lies in being technically the first feature to reference a form of lycanthropy—though even that badge comes with an asterisk, given that nothing resembling a werewolf appears on screen.

As a centenary artefact, Wolf Blood is valuable mostly in contrast. It reveals how essential atmosphere, visual imagination, and narrative conviction were to early horror’s development—and how barren a horror film becomes without them. While its contemporaries still throb with cinematic life, Wolf Blood feels anaemic, drained of tension and lacking both bite and bark. Forgotten by audiences and film history alike, it stands today as a reminder that not every first is foundational, and not every early effort deserves resurrection.

  • Saul Muerte

Beast of War (2025) — Sharks, Sweat, and Survival at the Edge of Roache-Turner’s Cinema

15 Monday Dec 2025

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Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testosterone, gallows humour, and a gleeful refusal to apologise for excess. Beast of War doesn’t abandon that DNA—it just throws it into the open ocean and strips it back to muscle, salt, and desperation.

Set during World War II, the film strands a group of young Australian soldiers on a shrinking raft in the Timor Sea after their boat goes down. There’s no grand campaign, no strategic victory to be won—just survival. The enemy comes in familiar forms: hunger, exposure, paranoia, and the creeping inevitability of death. Then there’s the shark. Big. Hungry. Patient. Circling like a debt that always comes due.

Roache-Turner approaches the material with the same bruised knuckles and dark grin that have defined his career. This is still a male, sweat-soaked pressure cooker of a film—men snapping at one another, egos flaring, leadership eroding under the sun. But where Wyrmwood leaned into anarchic mayhem, Beast of War opts for attrition. The humour is still there, sharp and irreverent, often surfacing in moments of grim resignation rather than punchline gags. A joke muttered through cracked lips. A laugh that dies halfway out of the mouth.

Visually, the film punches well above its weight. The cinematography makes art out of scarcity: endless blue horizons that feel less like freedom and more like a prison, sun-bleached skin rendered almost raw, the raft shrinking not just physically but psychologically. The production design understands that less is more—the sea doesn’t need dressing, and the raft becomes both stage and coffin. For a low-budget production, Beast of War carries itself with remarkable confidence.

The shadow of Jaws looms large, and Roache-Turner doesn’t pretend otherwise. The shark is used sparingly, often implied rather than shown, its presence felt through ripples, shadows, and the soldiers’ growing dread. More telling is the film’s spiritual debt to Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue—men trapped in open water, slowly realising the ocean doesn’t care about bravery or patriotism. Survival isn’t heroic. It’s ugly. It’s luck and endurance and the will to keep breathing one more minute than the bloke next to you.

Where Beast of War occasionally stumbles is in its character depth. The soldiers are broadly sketched—archetypes rather than fully formed men—and while that serves the film’s hard-boiled tone, it limits its emotional reach. When tempers flare or bodies slip beneath the water, the impact is felt more viscerally than personally. It’s effective, but not devastating.

Still, as a continuation of Roache-Turner’s career, Beast of War feels like a natural evolution. It tempers his bombast without sanding down his instincts, trading chainsaws and zombies for saltwater and teeth, while retaining the same irreverent edge. It’s a lean, muscular survival thriller that knows exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.

The Prognosis:

Beast of War isn’t about winning. It’s about lasting. About men pushed past bravado into something rawer and quieter. A gritty, blood-in-the-water chapter in Kiah Roache-Turner’s ongoing fascination with endurance, masculinity, and monsters—human and otherwise.

  • Saul Muerte

Shelby Oaks (2025) — When Found Footage Loses the Plot

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of found-footage horror, investigative mystery, and internet-age urban legend—a convergence that has produced some of the genre’s most enduring works. Unfortunately, Shelby Oaks doesn’t synthesise these influences so much as stack them on top of one another, resulting in a film that is ambitious in intent but disastrously unfocused in execution.

The central hook is a familiar one: the disappearance of Riley Brennan and her sister’s increasingly obsessive attempt to uncover what happened. On paper, it’s a solid spine—personal stakes fused with creeping dread. In practice, the film never decides what kind of horror story it wants to tell. It borrows liberally from the breadcrumb-style investigation of The Blair Witch Project, the faux-documentary escalation of Lake Mungo, the cursed-media mythology of Sinister, and the online-conspiracy aesthetics of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Rather than coalescing into something cohesive, these elements clash, constantly resetting the tone and momentum.

The found-footage framework, already a precarious format, becomes especially unwieldy here. The film toggles between mockumentary interviews, handheld investigation, archival clips, and conventional narrative scenes without any clear internal logic. What should feel immersive instead feels arbitrarily assembled, as though the film were endlessly re-editing itself in search of an identity it never quite finds. Tension dissipates not because the scares fail, but because the narrative keeps stopping to reinvent its own rules.

Worse still, the mystery at the film’s core grows less compelling the more it is elaborated. Each new revelation muddies the waters rather than deepening the dread, until the supernatural threat becomes a vaguely defined catch-all evil—more concept than presence. The obsession that should drive the story forward instead mirrors the film’s own fixation on referencing better works, mistaking accumulation for escalation.

To Stuckmann’s credit, Shelby Oaks is not without flashes of promise. A handful of isolated sequences suggest a filmmaker with a genuine affection for the genre and an understanding of its visual grammar. But affection alone is not authorship. Without discipline, restraint, or a unifying vision, the film collapses under the weight of its influences.

The Prognosis:

Shelby Oaks feels less like a horror film than a collage—an anxious attempt to be every successful found-footage mystery at once, and in doing so, failing to be anything at all. What begins as a missing-person story ends as a noisy, overextended hot mess, its sense of dread smothered by its own excess.

  • Saul Muerte

Haunted (1995) — A Handsome Ghost Story Searching for Its Own Pulse

29 Saturday Nov 2025

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Lewis Gilbert’s Haunted (1995) is one of those elegant, fog-draped period ghost tales that feels immediately familiar—handsome, atmospheric, well-appointed—yet never quite as stirring or chilling as it promises to be. Sitting in the late-career period of a director best known for shaping British cinema across decades (Alfie, Educating Rita, and a trio of Bond films), Haunted is a curious detour: a genteel supernatural romance wearing the clothes of a Gothic thriller, its pleasures found not in terror but in craftsmanship and star-making potential.

Gilbert brings his signature polish to the material. The English countryside glows with a painterly melancholy; the decaying Edbrook estate feels like a place where secrets seep from the wallpaper; and the film’s structure—rooted in an academic sceptic confronting the irrational—allows Gilbert to indulge in classic ghost story rhythms. But where his earlier work thrived on emotional immediacy and character complexity, Haunted often keeps its characters at an elegant distance. Its chills are tasteful, its reveals measured, its emotional turbulence curiously restrained.

Yet the film holds its greatest historical value in the emergence of Kate Beckinsale. This is the moment she fully announces herself—poised, luminous, and quietly magnetic. As Christina Mariell, Beckinsale blends innocence with a subtle, teasing darkness, foreshadowing the commanding screen presence that would follow in later roles. Haunted isn’t her breakout exactly (that credit often goes to Cold Comfort Farm or The Last Days of Disco), but it’s a pivotal early performance that demonstrates her range within genre cinema long before Underworld made her an international name.

Opposite her, Aidan Quinn delivers a thoughtful turn as Professor David Ash, a man defined by rational armour that Gilbert and the script slowly chip away. Their pairing adds a romantic heat the film otherwise struggles to ignite, helping anchor a narrative that threatens to drift into over-familiar Gothic territory.

The film’s shortcomings are largely tonal. Gilbert aims for a restrained, classical ghost story—something closer to The Innocents than the brasher supernatural thrillers of the 1990s—but the adaptation of James Herbert’s novel leans too heavily on melodramatic twists and over-explanatory reveals. The final act, particularly, gives in to excess at the very moment the film’s strength has been its quietude. You can feel the tension between a director committed to craft and a story eager to indulge in more conventional shock.

The Prognosis:

Haunted remains an enjoyable mid-tier entry in ’90s British genre cinema: undeniably flawed, but handsomely directed, occasionally haunting, and notable for capturing Beckinsale’s ascent at a formative moment. For Gilbert, it stands as a late-career experiment—an elegant but slightly undercooked ghost story that reminds us of his ability to shepherd character-driven drama even when surrounded by ectoplasm, séances, and flickering candlelight.

  • Saul Muerte

Transmutations (1985) — A Curious Misfire in the Barker Cinematic Bloodline

26 Wednesday Nov 2025

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George Pavlou’s Transmutations (also known as Underworld) occupies an awkward, largely forgotten corner in the canon of Clive Barker–related cinema—a curiosity rather than a cornerstone, a footnote rather than a foundation. Released two years before Hellraiser would redefine Barker’s place in the genre, this early attempt at translating his sensibilities to the screen delivers more frustration than fascination, offering only faint glimmers of the nightmarish imagination that would soon reshape horror.

The premise holds the embryonic outline of Barker’s obsessions: flesh in flux, identity undone, desire twisted into mutation. A missing sex worker, a wealthy puppet master, a mercenary ex-lover, and a secret colony of chemically altered outcasts living beneath the city—on paper, it’s unmistakably Barker. But while the ingredients are present, the alchemy is not. Pavlou’s direction lacks the atmosphere and transgressive conviction needed to bring Barker’s script to life, resulting instead in a confused stew of sci-fi noir, body horror, and crime thriller clichés.

What should feel mythic and grotesquely operatic instead feels oddly anaemic. The underground mutants—conceptually ripe territory for Barker’s fascination with monstrous otherness—never rise above rubber-suit awkwardness. Their tragedy is undercut by clumsy execution, their menace diluted by incoherent world-building. Even the film’s central hallucinogenic powder, a classic Barker motif of transcendence through sensation, slips through the story like an undeveloped idea.

For Barker admirers, the film is primarily interesting as a “before the storm” artifact: a glimpse of themes and images he’d later refine with far more confidence, from the eroticised metamorphoses of Hellraiser to the urban-myth underworlds of Nightbreed. Transmutations hints toward these futures but never manages to articulate its own identity. It’s a film caught between genres, visions, and expectations—ultimately satisfying none.

As a mid-1980s horror oddity, it has its moments of charm: a grubby London atmosphere, a handful of practical effects that almost work, and a pulpy energy that occasionally threatens to spark to life. But as part of the Barker cinematic legacy, Transmutations remains a minor and often misguided experiment—one that underscores how vital Barker’s own directorial control would become in shaping the stories he imagined for the screen.

The Prognosis:

A relic for completists, a curiosity for scholars of Barker’s filmography—but for most viewers, it’s easy to see why this particular mutation never evolved.

  • Saul Muerte

Pasolini’s Final Provocation: A Descent Into Filth, Fury, and the Failure of Outrage

22 Saturday Nov 2025

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There are films you watch.
There are films you endure.
And then there is Salò: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final cinematic scream, released weeks after he was murdered on an Ostia beach, his body left grotesquely mangled — an ending uncanny enough that it feels like it might have been authored by Pasolini himself.

To watch Salò is not merely to consume a film; it is to enter a locked chamber of Pasolini’s mind at its most confrontational, most cryptic, and most convinced that art must wound if it hopes to matter. It’s a cinematic razor blade dragged across the audience’s sense of morality, its meaning delivered less through narrative than through abrasion.

And yet — for all its notoriety, for all its moral panic, for all the scholarly wrangling around it — Salò remains a polarising, deeply compromised vision. A film that demands you applaud its audacity while questioning whether its assaultive method ever truly earns its brutality.

The Last Testament of a Man at War

By 1975, Pasolini had become a cultural lightning rod: Marxist poet, queer public intellectual, devout critic of capitalism, devourer of myth and folklore, the “wyrd prophet” of Italy’s post-war anxieties. He remained perpetually in conflict — with the state, the Church, the bourgeoisie, the police, the left, the right, and often himself.

Salò emerges from this volatile crucible as both testament and tantrum — the vision of a man who believed society had already surrendered to a fascism more insidious than Mussolini’s: a consumerist degradation of the human spirit.

By updating de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to the dying days of the Republic of Salò, Pasolini stages fascism not as political ideology but as the terminal condition of a culture that has lost its soul. Every atrocity — the forced meals of excrement, the mechanised sexual violence, the casual execution of youth — is framed with the cold, bureaucratic stillness of a society numbed by its own cruelty.

But the question that haunts Salò, and haunts us still, is this:
Does Pasolini expose fascism, or replicate its gaze?

A Museum of Horrors, Curated With Clinical Precision

The film unfolds in circles — the Anteinferno, the Circle of Obsessions, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Blood — as if Dante himself collaborated with a mortician. Pasolini arranges bodies like objects, frames violence as ritual, and refuses any catharsis that might allow the viewer moral escape.

The performances are deliberately stiff, theatrical, emptied of emotion. The victims are blank slates; the libertines are stylised monsters. Everything is choreographed with a perversely detached elegance.

It is simultaneously the point and the problem.
Pasolini wants to suffocate us — but suffocation is not the same thing as meaning.

Where the Film’s Power Slips

For all its intellectual scaffolding, Salò spirals into a paradox:
Pasolini indicts dehumanisation by dehumanising.
He condemns voyeurism by forcing us to be voyeurs.
He rails against fascism while reproducing its structures.

This is the crux of its polarising legacy.
Some critics call it the most important film of the twentieth century; others consider it an irredeemable wallow in cinematic sadism.

My view — at a measured and wary two stars — sits in the uneasy middle: Pasolini’s overarching thesis is potent, his courage (or recklessness) undeniable, but the film’s unrelenting brutality eventually dulls the intellectual edge it seeks to sharpen. That shock becomes monotony; horror becomes repetition; outrage becomes noise.

There is no escalation, only accumulation.
No revelation, only endurance.
No life — only Pasolini’s autopsy of humanity.

The Haunting Aftermath: Art as Provocation, Art as Suicide Note

And yet, perhaps the true power of Salò lies not in the film itself but in the myth that formed around it. Pasolini died before he could defend it, revise it, or distance himself from it. The film became a tombstone — a final act of aesthetic defiance from a man who had always preferred confrontation to comfort.

His death casts a radioactive glow across Salò.
It colours every frame with an eerie sense of inevitability, as if the film were a prophecy of his own destruction.
You don’t watch Salò thinking about the characters.
You watch it thinking about Pasolini.

The gap between artist and artwork collapses entirely.
Perhaps that is what he intended.
Or perhaps it is the final irony — that a filmmaker obsessed with exposing societal decay has, in his last work, created something that ultimately feels embalmed, sealed off from the living world.

The Prognosis:

Salò remains a cultural Rorschach test: a masterpiece of provocation for some, an act of cinematic masochism for others. My own viewing leaves me with admiration for Pasolini’s audacity, respect for his intellectual rage, and deep reservations about the film’s blunt-force method.

A monumental idea, trapped in a punishing, airless execution.
A film easier to analyse than to justify, and easier to endure than to embrace.

  • Saul Muerte