As in Michael Haneke's films, the director seems to be challenging the audience to question their own voyeuristic instincts.
Forty years after A Clockwork Orange, audiences are surely too used to these kind of shock tactics to be affected by them – or so we might think. In the film-within-a-film, Vukmir, the psychiatrist-turned-porn director, may be striving for the ultimate realism but Spasojevic heightens the absurdity. The most notorious scenes (the rape of the new-born baby, the scene in which the star decapitates a woman and continues to have sex with her headless torso) are grotesque but very obviously contrived. The film-making is stylised and self-conscious. That, though, is not the same as saying that it is a repellent film.
Much of the imagery in A Serbian Film is indeed quite repellent.