Satyricon (1969)

Director: Federico Fellini
Starring: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born

I stumbled across Fellini’s Satyricon while poking around on my parents’ Prime subscription one evening. They’d gone to bed, so I had the house to myself and a few quiet hours to kill. The title intrigued me, and within minutes I was pulled into one of the strangest, most unsettling, and genuinely mesmerising films I’ve ever seen.

Fellini’s Satyricon is an experience more than a film—a surreal journey through the fragmented remains of Petronius’ ancient Roman novel. It’s challenging, baffling, and captivating. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I’d wandered through a fever dream and come out the other side profoundly altered.

A Story Built from Fragments

Petronius’ Satyricon survives only in pieces, so Fellini embraced its fragmentary nature and crafted a film that mirrors the novel’s disjointed, episodic structure. The story follows two young men, Encolpius and Ascyltus, as they drift through a bizarre, violent, and decaying Roman world. They feud over the catamite Giton, stumble into the infamous Feast of Trimalchio, are sold into slavery, and encounter revolutions, bizarre rituals, and moments of despair.

There’s no neat arc, no satisfying resolution, and no hand-holding. The film demands that you surrender to its strangeness. One moment you’re watching an earthquake collapse a tenement; the next, you’re at a banquet where an obscenely wealthy host mocks death while drunk slaves collapse in exhaustion. Fellini never explains. You’re just there, watching, as if dropped into an alien world without a guide.

A Radical Foreignness

What sets Satyricon apart from most films about the Roman Empire is how thoroughly it rejects modern sensibilities. Fellini’s Rome isn’t the clean, noble world of Quo Vadis or even the slick Hollywood grit of Gladiator. It’s chaotic and deeply unsettling.

Fellini heightens this alienness through deliberate choices. The dubbing is jarring—Italian actors speaking English, then dubbed back into Italian, with snatches of Latin, Greek, and other languages thrown in. Characters stare blankly at the camera, their faces painted and adorned with elaborate jewellery, their expressions ranging from despair to indifference. Every scene screams, You do not belong here.

One moment burned into my mind is the theatrical play at the start of the film. A slave is dragged onto the stage, mutilated to act out a miracle of the Divine Emperor, and left bleeding as the audience watches without much interest. It’s brutal and casual, a snapshot of a world where slaves are property, and the boundaries of cruelty and art blur in ways we can hardly comprehend.

Authenticity in Its Own Way

There’s a rough kind of authenticity in Satyricon that most historical epics lack. This isn’t the clean marble world of other Roman films—it’s messy, fragmented, and grounded in strange, specific details.

Take Trimalchio’s banquet, for instance. The ludicrously wealthy Trimalchio boasts that one of his slaves can read a book on sight and multiply by ten. These feats sound trivial to modern ears but were impressive in a world without punctuation or positional notation. Or consider the brief scene of a wealthy couple committing suicide to escape a condemnation decree, the man assuring his slaves that he retains the legal right to free them until the decree arrives.

These moments feel plucked from a world we can glimpse but not fully understand. Fellini fills the gaps with his own imagination—bald women bathing in candlelight, cryptic gestures used to barter sex, and armies marching past rotting crucified bodies. None of it is explained, and that’s the point.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

If there’s one area where Fellini pushes too far, it’s his focus on all-male sex. Yes, the Romans lacked our modern sexual categories, and men often took pleasure with both boys and women. But Satyricon tilts too heavily in one direction. It’s like serving a banquet of nothing but very dark chocolate—interesting and intense, but you start to crave something more balanced.

The film might have benefitted from more variety in its depiction of Roman sexuality. While it’s clear Fellini wanted to emphasize the strangeness and decadence of the period, his choices sometimes feel more reflective of his own artistic preferences than the historical reality he’s trying to evoke.

The Artistic Impact

For all its strangeness, Satyricon is a masterpiece. The visuals are stunning, the performances haunting, and the atmosphere utterly immersive. It’s not a film you watch casually. It demands your full attention and rewards you with an experience that lingers after the credits have rolled.

There’s a moment near the end when Encolpius and Ascyltus seem to realize how futile their wandering has been. Their faces, painted and weary, seem to stare directly at you, daring you to make sense of what you’ve seen. That moment, like so much of the film, is unforgettable.

Conclusion

If you’ve never seen Satyricon, you’ve missed something extraordinary. It’s not an easy film, and it’s certainly not for everyone. But for those willing to step into its alien world, it offers an experience unlike any other.

I’d recommend finding the Criterion transfer for the best visual quality—and watching it late at night, when the world is quiet, and you can give yourself over to its strangeness. It’s a film that will challenge you, haunt you, and maybe even change the way you think about history and storytelling.