These expository details are disseminated with an inelegance that, oddly, never quite tips over into camp, and the pithiness fills us with uneasy anticipation.

The first two acts have the doggedly but comfortably formulaic structure of a folktale: A shaggy, retired porn star, Miloš (Srđan Todorović), once known as an “artist of fuck” for his indomitable virility and camera-friendly technique, is offered a tidy sum by an enigmatic, Rasputin-eyed movie director named Vukmir (Sergej Trifunović) to perform one last time on a cryptic project. But aside from a sputtering monologue comparing Serbia’s masses to raped, dithering orphans, writer-director Srđan Spasojević’s content flowers with mostly psychological resonance his film is better than the nationalist lividness that may have been its impetus. Pasolini’s similarly disturbing Salò bemoaned the manner in which fascism cultivates a world with two classes and no exploitative limits one suspects from the title that A Serbian Film’s raucousness is meant to be taken as an analogous socio-political salvo. The filial kink and corporeal grittiness set out not to offend our rubric of taste, but to dismantle it, and thereby reveal the pensively anthropological nuance of their grotesqueness. With sickeningly smooth digital cinematography and a terminally rusted conscience, the film pummels an assembly line of taboos beyond the point of recognition-indeed, nearly beyond perversion. The rare piece of transgressive art that’s more grimly meditative than satirical or allegorical, A Serbian Film’s most daring aspect may be the muddle of soul-searching it demands from its audience.

A serbian film ending scene