Curator Watchlist
A wildly stylized, episodic descent through ancient Rome that trades conventional plot for dream logic, grotesque comedy, and visual excess. It’s essential viewing for viewers who value atmosphere, art direction, and cinematic audacity over narrative clarity.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 2h 9m
Director: Federico Fellini
Starring: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born
After his young lover, Gitone, leaves him for another man, Encolpio decides to kill himself, but a sudden earthquake destroys his home before he has a chance to do so. Now wandering around Rome in the time of Nero, Encolpio encounters one bizarre and surreal scene after another.
Federico Fellini
Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born
A wildly stylized, episodic descent through ancient Rome that trades conventional plot for dream logic, grotesque comedy, and visual excess. It’s essential viewing for viewers who value atmosphere, art direction, and cinematic audacity over narrative clarity.
Satyricon is less a story than a hallucination: a loose, feverish drift through a Rome that feels excavated from myth, memory, and nightmare. Fellini strips away historical realism and replaces it with pageantry, corruption, sensuality, and absurdity, creating a world that is both ancient and strangely modern in its appetite and decay.
The film’s power is in its images. Sets, costumes, faces, and bodies are arranged like moving frescoes, then undercut by sudden ugliness or comic disorientation. It can feel deliberately elusive, even cold, but that distance is part of its design: the movie wants to be experienced as a sequence of shocks, textures, and symbols rather than followed scene by scene.
For viewers who connect with cinematic excess, Satyricon is a major work of imagination. For anyone expecting a conventional adaptation or a coherent plot, it may be frustrating. But as a piece of surreal historical fantasia, it remains one of Fellini’s most daring and singular films.
Michael's Cinema Paradiso (5★) · 367 likes
Afterthoughts: Fellini’s orgiastic odyssey through Ancient Rome is a sheer, debauched delight. Gliding seamlessly from one erotic and extravagant episode to the next, Fellini takes us on a richly symbolic journey of sex and violence that beams with colourful sights and sounds, critiquing the consumerist hedonism of capitalist modernity, whilst offering an eccentric look at one of history's most interesting civilisations. Similarly to the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, it is a great joy to see Fellini granted all the necessary… more
Jesus Meller (4★) · 349 likes
Might fuck around and buy myself a slave twink.
Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 (5★) · 245 likes
If an experiment was conducted consisting in submitting a modest cinema connoisseur to this beautiful and decadently disastrous orgy of anarchic cultural aspects of Rome, perhaps the first name that would pop up to his head was Pasolini. Surprisingly, it isn't. More surprisingly, this rebellious piece of art entered the business before Pasolini's Trilogy of Life. Truth is, Satyricon is the turning point for the legend that Fellini already was before autobiographical memoirs and nostalgia invaded his mind with controversial youth moments added here and there for spicing up his love letters to the city that gave him life and an identity forever. 99/100
Paul Schrader · 225 likes
CALLING ALL HOMOSEXUALS. I had an itch tonight to rewatch Fellini's Satyricon which I did. It's much as I remembered it: a fevered dream film which can only be evaluated on the level of dream transportation at which level I found it wanting. Canby and Ebert were ecstatic (I followed all the reviews then); Kael and Simon negative. Parker Tyler called it the greatest homosexual film ever made (Parker was inclined to hyperbole)--but is it? Is it even a homosexual
matt lynch (4★) · 190 likes
Very much Fellini's KWAIDAN, an induced, deliberately artificial fugue state designed to bring the desires and traumas of the past back to us. They're still ours.
Another Fellini landmark that turns inward, blending memory, fantasy, and self-scrutiny into a visually expressive dream of artistic crisis.
Shares the same baroque imagination and psychological surrealism, with a lush, episodic structure and a fascination with desire and illusion.
A companion piece in Fellini’s exploration of decadence, spectacle, and spiritual emptiness in modern society.
A strikingly different but equally serious use of historical imagery, offering austere ritual, mythic force, and spiritual intensity.
For viewers interested in extremity, corruption, and the anatomy of power, this is a more brutal but thematically adjacent descent into human depravity.
A stylized, psychologically charged historical film that uses design and atmosphere to probe moral emptiness and social performance.
Another bold reimagining of sacred or ancient material that privileges inner vision, sensuality, and spiritual conflict over realism.
Epic in scope but meditative in structure, it combines historical setting with philosophical inquiry and unforgettable imagery.
A surreal, symbolic journey through violence and mysticism that matches the film’s strange, confrontational energy.
Perhaps the closest match for viewers who want pure visual delirium, allegory, and a fearless attack on conventional storytelling.
An essential reference point for dreamlike ambiguity, where space, memory, and desire become destabilized and hypnotic.
A rigorous art-film counterpart that turns identity into a psychological and visual puzzle, with intense formal control.
decadence, surrealism, ancient Rome, sexuality, moral collapse, dream logic, impermanence, grotesque comedy
surreal, arthouse, historical fantasy, decadent, episodic, dreamlike, erotic, grotesque, 1960s cinema, visual spectacle