Women are either silent or reduced to bloody pulp in Tarantino's love letter to Hollywood, which, finds Leaf Arbuthnot, has only male audience members laughing

The first time I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the cinema, I was unsettled. As Quentin Tarantino's ode to a sun-kissed, bygone Hollywood – starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading actor and Brad Pitt as his buddy and stunt double – drew to its bloody finale, whoops and laughs rumbled around the screening room. On screen, female characters were being butchered and mangled in the most obscene way possible: what was so funny? And, more unnerving still, why were all the audience members laughing male?

On one level the reaction made sense: the female characters had been making a racket for ages and were themselves intent on violence. But on another, this was the sound of men in a cinema having a laugh at some young women being mashed up. And why weren’t women laughing too? As I walked out of the auditorium, I had a clear sense of who’d been delighting in the misogynistic carnage: gentle-seeming blokes in their twenties and thirties, enjoying a Friday night.

When I got home, I told my flatmate that I felt unnerved by the extreme violence and the laughter. She said she’d experienced the same thing at the cinema: the only viewers to whoop, clap and laugh when the women were slaughtered were men. The idea of Tarantino winning Best Picture for the first time at the Oscars tonight – where he is neck and neck with Sam Mendes for 1917 – fills me with dread.