Salo Or Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom May 2026

★★★★ (but I will never watch it again)

There are difficult films, and then there is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 masterpiece of horror, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom . Over forty years later, it still sits on the farthest edge of what cinema can endure. salo or salo or the 120 days of sodom

The final twenty minutes of Salò are among the most punishing in cinema. There is no last-minute rescue, no moral epiphany for the villains. The masters sit on a rooftop, spyglasses in hand, watching the remaining teenagers through binoculars as they are killed. Then they dance a minuet to a piano. ★★★★ (but I will never watch it again)

You do not “like” Salò . You survive it. And if you have the stomach to look, you will see a mirror held up not just to 1944, but to any society that treats humans as things—including our own. There is no last-minute rescue, no moral epiphany

Pasolini transposes the Marquis de Sade’s infamous 18th-century novel (written in a prison cell) to the fascist puppet state of Salò, Italy, 1944. Four libertine masters—a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate, and a President—abduct eighteen young men and women. They take them to a isolated villa, where for 120 days, the teenagers are subjected to a systematic program of humiliation, ritualized depravity, and eventual torture and murder.

The film is structured like a Dantean circle of Hell: the “Ante-Inferno” of selection, followed by the circles of Mania, Shit, and Blood.