Aleksandar “Srdjan” Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film (2010) is notorious for its content: scenes of sexual violence, grotesque horror, and taboo-shattering imagery. For most, the response is immediate revulsion. Beneath the surface of shock, however, lies something colder, darker, and strangely funnier: a black satire dressed in exploitation’s most depraved costume.
Indeed, as difficult as it is to consider, A Serbian Film presents a premise so absurd that it borders on the comedic.
A Serbian Film’s Dark Comedy
Milos (Srdjan ‘Zika’ Todorovic), a retired porn star, is lured back into the industry by an enigmatic director who wishes to cast him for his “powerful erection”. That line alone feels ripped from a John Waters fever dream. The tone is sleazy but theatrical, vulgar but performative. A Serbian Film knows what it is.
What follows is a descent into a kind of performance art pornography, financed by shadowy elites. Unlike typical exploitation films, though, here the absurdity is dialed up to operatic heights: child actors, snuff fantasies, incestuous choreography. Every taboo is not just crossed, but ritualized.
Indeed, if there’s a single moment when A Serbian Film reveals its grotesque satirical bent, it’s the monologue involving goats, monks, and cum-spread said by Vukmir to Milos:
“Rare kind of monks put seven adult he-goats into a shed during summer. They leave them for a month until their balls are like melons. When they get too hot, they start fucking one another. The monks take the dried bloody cum off their balls and mix it with milk. It makes the finest bread spread there is. You’re a he-goat, Milos. I’m your monk.”
This line is so elaborate and vulgar that it loops back into something almost poetic. It plays like a perverse folk tale or an apocalyptic entry in a cookbook. Spoken straight, it becomes a darkly comic ritual chant.
What many viewers miss — or reject outright — is that A Serbian Film is, at its core, darkly humorous. The absurdity of its premise, the ritualistic exaggeration of its violence, and the surreal monologues all point to a deliberate satirical tone. The film isn’t just meant to disturb; it’s meant to disturb because it mirrors the absurdity of systemic violence, cultural repression, and moral hypocrisy of the Italian government and the autocracy’s complicity in the rise of Fascism and the Third Reich in Europe during World War II.
Laughter at Unreality As Nervous Recoil to Reality
A Serbian Film often indulges in kill scenes more reminiscent of slasher films or gory parodies. In one especially surreal moment, Milos kills a man by shoving his erect penis into his eye socket. It’s horrific, yes, but it also recalls the exaggerated set-ups of a grindhouse punchline. The act is so ludicrous, so beyond real physical threat, that it becomes a kind of grotesque mime show of phallic power.
Even the final moments—a cascade of incest and despair—read like the logical conclusion to a joke no one dared finish. But they did. And it ends with the camera still rolling.
There’s nothing funny about that, many will say. They’re not wrong. However, A Serbian Film‘s humor isn’t built on punchlines; it’s built on absurdity. It’s gallows humor as a form of trauma processing. It dares the viewer to laugh, not because it’s funny, but because the scream is too loud to hear the subtext otherwise.
A Serbian Film plays in the realm of ritualized obscenity, of ceremonial abuse, and of state-sponsored nightmare logic. It is an exercise in moral endurance—but also dark satire, built on the grotesque reality of power and propaganda.
What many viewers miss — or reject outright — is that A Serbian Film is, at its core, darkly humorous. The absurdity of its premise, the ritualistic exaggeration of its violence, and the surreal monologues all point to a deliberate satirical tone. The film isn’t just meant to disturb; it’s meant to disturb because it mirrors the absurdity of systemic violence, cultural repression, and moral hypocrisy of the Italian government and the autocracy’s complicity in the rise of Fascism and the Third Reich in Europe during World War II.
To view it without recognizing that humor is to misread the film’s intent. Director Spasojevic isn’t laughing at the victims: he’s laughing at the systems that breed them. He dares you to laugh too, if only to survive what you’re seeing.
Dark Comedy as Political Exorcism
Like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), A Serbian Film plays in the realm of ritualized obscenity, ceremonial abuse, and state-sponsored nightmare logic. Both films are exercises in moral endurance. They are also both intended as dark satire, built on the grotesque reality of power and propaganda.
It’s easy to reduce A Serbian Film to its extremity. Yet in doing so, we risk missing its lineage. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom — often cited as the gold standard for “serious” political shock cinema — shares more DNA with Spasojevic’s film than most critics admit. Both are chamber pieces of abjection. Both use the body as a battlefield. And both, crucially, contain an undercurrent of dark comedy so dry it’s difficult to detect the flavor of absurdism.
In interviews included with the Criterion edition of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini notes that many sequences were intentionally absurd or theatrical. The feces, infamously, were made of chocolate and orange marmalade. On set, there was laughter. What the audience interprets as unbearable degradation was, at times, a joke aimed at fascism’s bizarre rituals and the way power sterilizes cruelty through performance.
The same holds true for A Serbian Film. The deadpan delivery, ceremonial lighting, and stylized sex-death choreography — these are not naturalistic. They’re satirical, grotesque exaggerations of art film pretensions. Even the musical score, with its grand, almost mournful tones, frames the violence not as thrills but as liturgy.
Laughter here is not endorsement: it’s recoil, reflex, and recognition. A Serbian Film doesn’t say “laugh at this”; it says “this is what it takes to make you look.” The joke is not on the victims; it’s on the mechanisms that allow exploitation to masquerade as expression, as entertainment, even as liberation.
To laugh is to see through the costume. To see the ritual. To realize: you’ve been watching a parody of the system all along; one so extreme, it loops back around to tragicomedy.
The Perverse Aristocracy
The ending of A Serbian Film plays like the punchline to a horrific variation of the world’s filthiest joke: The Aristocrats. In that infamous comedy bit, the buildup is an improvised litany of taboos — incest, bestiality, excrement — delivered with deadpan timing until the final punchline: “What do you call the act?” The Aristocrats!”
Here, shock is not the goal but the medium. The real joke targets the audience’s expectations, the limits of taste, and society’s willingness to tolerate unspeakable acts when they’re cloaked in ritual and formality.
A Serbian Film concludes in a manner similar to its beginning. After a relentless descent into almost unspeakable violence and exploitation, the final scene — with a cameraman poised to start again from the beginning — delivers a grotesque anti-punchline. It’s not just nihilistic; it’s satirical in the bleakest, most unsettling way possible, forcing viewers to confront the cyclical nature of trauma and spectacle in our world.