A requiem for a corpse that doesn't know it's dead. Perhaps there is no more exact way to define the liturgical and thanatological nature of "One Way or Another", the testamentary work with which Elio Petri, in 1976, did not merely film the end of an era, but officiated the funeral rite for an entire ruling class, portraying it as a grotesque congress of zombies in a modernist bunker. The film is a black monolith planted in the heart of the Years of Lead, a cinematic object so virulent, unpleasant, and prophetic that it was devoured and regurgitated by history itself, condemned to an existence as a cursed artifact, almost a visual samizdat that survived its own de facto censorship.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Leonardo Sciascia, Petri's film commits an act of sublime betrayal, a hyperbole that transfigures the Sicilian writer's quasi-metaphysical investigation into an expressionist hallucination, a political Grand Guignol that reeks of sulfur and stale incense. Where Sciascia uses a scalpel to dissect the connections between power and mystery, Petri wields a club and a handheld camera, smashing every last shred of realism to plunge us into a Dantesque circle of hell made of reinforced concrete. The site of this sabbath is the Zafer Hermitage, a brutalist eco-monstrosity born from the mind of Dante Ferretti, who here conceives an absolute non-place: a hotel-crypt, an aseptic labyrinth that is at once a confessional, a courtroom, and a tomb. It is an architecture of the soul, an Overlook Hotel for the Italian political conscience, where the ghosts are not the victims of a bloody past, but the executioners of a decomposing present.

Inside this futuristic sepulcher gathers the entire nomenclature of Christian Democrat power—ministers, senators, bankers, industrialists—for Ignatian spiritual exercises led by Don Gaetano (a mellifluous and Mephistophelean Marcello Mastroianni, a mask of clerical cynicism that long ago traded faith for influence). But the true epicenter of the moral earthquake is He, the President, embodied by a Gian Maria Volonté who transcends acting to become demonic possession. His is not a portrait; it is a vivisection. With a physical and vocal mimesis that anticipates the impending tragedy, Volonté molds a monstrous and chilling caricature of Aldo Moro, transforming him into a ticking automaton of power, a puppet with courtly gestures, whose oratory is a torrent of empty signifiers, a verbal baroque that masks an ethical desert. He is a grotesque body, a Christian Democrat Ubu Roi who stammers, contorts, prays, and commands with the same slimy humility. His performance is one of the most courageous and terrifying in the history of cinema: he does not interpret a man, but the sickness of power itself, its autophagic and parasitic nature.

Petri orchestrates this descent into hell with the precision of an entomologist and the fury of an iconoclast. The camera moves like a caged animal through the oppressive corridors of Zafer, capturing faces deformed by the grotesque, sweaty and flaccid bodies huddled together in meaningless rituals. Prayer becomes a macabre chant, confession a list of state-sanctioned crimes, the Eucharist an act of symbolic cannibalism. In this, "One Way or Another" is the Italian cousin—dirtier and more desperate—of Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel". Like the bourgeoisie of the Aragonese master, Petri's powerful are trapped in a space that is a projection of their own inner imprisonment. But while in Buñuel the trap is surreal and inexplicable, in Petri it is terrifyingly concrete: they are confined not by a mysterious force, but by their own guilt, paranoia, and mutual terror. The arrival of death, a series of murders that decimates those present, is not a classic whodunit element, but the detonator that causes the system to implode. The "whodunit" is a pretext: the murderer is irrelevant, because they are all guilty. The murderer is the system itself, beginning to devour its own limbs.

The film converses at a distance with another contemporary masterpiece, Pasolini's "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom". Both stage a sadistic, ritualized power within a closed space. But while Pasolini abstracts his allegory into a mythical and universal dimension, drawing on de Sade to speak of the ultimate nature of power, Petri plunges his hands into the mud of Italian current events. His is not a metaphysical fascism, but the molecular fascism of a democratic regime in metastasis, the rot of a power that perpetuates itself through blackmail, corruption, and the clientelistic management of faith. Ennio Morricone's score, dissonant and sacred, amplifies this sense of profaned liturgy, blending Gregorian chants with muffled percussion, as if one were listening to the music of a failed exorcism.

The tragedy, however, is that "One Way or Another" revealed itself to be not so much a satire as a prophecy that was all too accurate. Released two years before the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the film became an untenable object after the events of Via Fani. Volonté's mask had become intolerably superimposed upon the face of the real, martyred statesman. The film, which denounced a system, was all but accused of having predicted and "justified" its most dramatic crisis. It vanished from circulation, becoming a ghost, a footnote for "carbonari" cinephiles. This extra-cinematic history amplifies its power, transforming it into a historical document in spite of itself, a work of art that reality chased down and surpassed in its ferocity.

To see it again today is to plunge into an aesthetic and intellectual apnea. It is a difficult, repellent, claustrophobic, and deliberately unpleasant film. It offers neither catharsis nor hope. Its lucidity is cruel. Petri leaves no escape route, neither for the viewer nor for his characters, who ultimately dance in a kind of final sabbath that more closely resembles the "Danse Macabre" from a medieval fresco than any kind of liberation. It is the dance of the living dead on the Titanic of an entire republic. "One Way or Another" is political cinema in the highest and most radical sense of the term: not a rally in images, but a surgical operation on a nation's subconscious, an autopsy performed on the still-warm body of Power. A necessary and poisonous masterpiece, whose formal and intellectual courage is matched only by the desperation that pervades it. It is the distorting mirror in which an entire ruling class saw its own portrait of Dorian Gray, and tried, in vain, to shatter it to pieces.