wealth and decadence

Films whose social world is constituted by inherited or accumulated wealth — manor houses, dynastic estates, financial elites, aristocratic rituals — where money and class function not merely as backdrop but as the primary structuring force of behavior, desire, and moral corruption, whether the film regards that world with fascination, satire, or elegiac mourning. The register encompasses both insider portraits (The Leopard, Phantom Thread, Howards End) and outsider-penetration narratives (Saltburn, Knives Out, Triangle of Sadness), united by the fact that the architecture, manners, and power of extreme wealth are what the film is fundamentally about. Distinct from urban-alienation (which centers the city as an anonymizing, isolating force experienced by ordinary or marginal people) by requiring wealth itself — its rituals, spaces, and corruptions — to be the social engine; distinct from bohemian-scene (which centers artistic or countercultural communities that may overlap with money but whose defining texture is creative milieu rather than class power).