Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Uberto Paolo Quintavalle
Runtime: 117 minutes

Synopsis: In World War II Italy, four fascist libertines round up nine adolescent boys and girls and subject them to one hundred and twenty days of physical, mental, and sexual torture.

Verdict: If you’re familiar with Harry Potter lore, you probably know what a dementor is. For those who aren’t, they're basically cloaked creatures who have the notorious ability to suck the happiness out of a person.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s provocative critique on fascism “Salò” is the movie equivalent of a dementor.

Released 3 weeks after his shadowy murder and loosely adapted from the infamous novel by controversial French writer the Marquis de Sade "120 Days of Sodom", Pasolini’s film is a tough exercise to get through. Structured similarly to Dante’s Inferno, it’s a largely unsettling, uncomfortable, disturbing watch that sees four libertine fascists subject eighteen adolescents to inconceivable psychological, sexual, and physical torture for 120 interminable days.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure what to make of “Salò” purely because it achieves exactly what it aims to accomplish. It may be gruesome, even horrifying at times, but that was Pasolini’s goal from the get-go as he wanted to showcase in the most shocking of ways the atrocities conducted by Mussolini’s fascist regime during the Second World War. My issues with it come from a more subjective lens, a lens that saw the film as one that doesn’t offer much to the conversation and that becomes at a certain point a repetitive, irritating watch that’s more interested in shocking its audience.

When “Salò” ended, all I could think about was the gore and torture afflicted to the young victims. It’s an experience I’ve sat through twice so far (who’s the real masochist here?) without ever entirely getting into the main themes it wants to tackle. The only thing it managed to successfully achieve is to fill me with actual, unfiltered hatred for the four abductors and their accomplices, which I guess means that it at least partially did what it was set to achieve?

FINAL GRADE: 4/10