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
Surgeons of Horror 