Satyricon

Fellini – Satyricon (1969) is available to watch online on iFILM — Federico Fellini's 129-minute plunge into a Rome that never quite existed, built from the surviving scraps of Petronius' ancient novel. The tagline said it plainly: Rome, before Christ, after Fellini. It screened in competition at Cannes in 1969 and confirmed that Fellini had stopped making films people could comfortably explain.

Young Encolpio loses his beloved Gitone to a rival, survives a botched suicide by sheer geological accident — an earthquake levels his building — and then drifts through a succession of scenes that grow stranger by the hour. Slave markets, lavish banquets, witches, sea creatures, theatrical spectacles, death treated as minor inconvenience. The cast, led by Martin Potter and Hiram Keller, moves through it all with the blank calm of people who have stopped asking what comes next.

What makes this film genuinely difficult to shake is how little it resembles a historical epic and how much it resembles a fever dream about now. There is no arc to follow, only a series of tableaux that accumulate into something unsettling. Not an easy watch — but there is nothing else quite like it. Stream Fellini – Satyricon online on iFILM.