Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
On Quartile, Satyricon scores 7/10 across five categories — strongest on Cinematography (Well Above Average), weakest on Plot (Below Average).
Ranked among Quartile’s Top Cinematography.
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.
Fellini's Satyricon is a singular, hallucinatory fever dream — one of cinema's most audacious and genuinely alien works. Its cinematography is extraordinary: painterly, saturated compositions that evoke crumbling frescoes and decadent excess, shot by Giuseppe Rotunno with remarkable invention. Its novelty is equally exceptional; no other film feels quite like this fragmented procession of pagan tableaux, deliberately dreamlike and anti-narrative. Acting is serviceable within the intentionally stylized, distanced mode Fellini demands. However, the plot — such as it is — is deliberately episodic to the point of near-incoherence, which is partly the point but still functions as a weakness in conventional terms. The ending, abrupt and unresolved (characters literally turning into stone fresco), is thematically consistent but dramatically unsatisfying for many viewers, earning a below-average mark on pure narrative closure.