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.
Ratings
Curator score: 6.4/10
IMDb: 6.8/10
Letterboxd: 3.71/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 76%
TMDB: 6.7/10
Director
Federico Fellini
Production
PEA
Cast
Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born, Salvo Randone, Mario Romagnoli, Magali Noël, Capucine, Fanfulla, Gordon Mitchell, George Eastman, Carlo Giordana, Donyale Luna, Elisa Mainardi, Marcella Di Falco, Tanya Lopert, Hylette Adolphe, Joseph Wheeler, Lucia Bosè, Giuseppe Sanvitale, Danika La Loggia
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
Fellini devotees
fans of surreal and experimental cinema
viewers drawn to decadent historical worlds
people who enjoy films as visual experiences
audiences open to erotic, grotesque, and dreamlike imagery
Skip if
you need a tight story or clear character arc
you dislike episodic, abstract filmmaking
you’re put off by sexual frankness and bodily grotesquerie
you want historically grounded realism
you prefer fast-paced, easily legible narratives
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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… more 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… more
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.