Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom (Salò O Le 120 Giornate Di Sodoma) Review

Salò was the final film by Pier Paulo Pasolini, a filmmaker whose flashes of brilliance came at the price of controversy and self-indulgence. The director was murdered - for reasons which have never become entirely clear - shortly after the film's completion in 1975, and this grim exercise in excoriating extremity represents an end-point in several other respects. Forget all you know about conventional horror or smirking torture porn. Salò is the real deal: a slow tread through thick human filth.

For the film's defenders that's precisely the point: this is a radical political statement about the failure of fascism and the unchecked impulses aroused by unchecked power. For its detractors Salò is a nasty piece of arthouse exploitica which revels rather too freely in the spectacle of moral freefall. Either way it's a horrowshow exercise in ultra-extreme filmmaking, unparalleled by anyone, anywhere, ever.

Inspired by the work of literature's own philosopher of the damned the Marquis De Sade, Salò is set in the dying days of Mussolini's regime at the end of the Second World War. Four corrupt officers hole up in an isolated villa where they make a queasy pact to marry each other's daughters - an act of strangely sordid solidarity in the light of what's to come. The officers round up 18 faceless boys and girls (let's offer Pasolini the benefit of doubt and call them 'barely legal') who become pawns in an extended, joyless orgy - a rebarbative ritual which involves mutilation, humiliation, torture and coprophagia, depicted by Passolini with the unsparingly cold eye of a forensic investigation.