News

After making a splash with his uncompromising incest drama Saint-Narcisse, underground Canadian filmmaker Bruce Labruce returned to Berlinale last year with The Visitor, his explicit take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. Ahead of a release from Circle Collective starting this Friday at Roxy Cinema in New York followed by Landmark NuArt in Los Angeles on March 14, with additional cities, the X-rated trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “London, today. A refugee washes up naked in a suitcase on the bank of the Thames. The enigmatic, sexually fluid stranger introduces himself to a bourgeois, upper class family. He is invited to stay on as an employee. The Visitor soon seduces each member of the family in a series of explicit sexual encounters. He will turn their world upside down as they are able to redefine themselves in new, radical ways.”

Savina Petkova said in her review, “Pasolini...

It’s safe to call Canadian artist and filmmaker Bruce Labruce a Panorama mainstay; it’s been two decades and counting since Hustler White premiered in this Berlinale strand in 1996. Between The Misandrists and his latest, The Visitor (Panorama 2024), there was the indie feature Saint-Narcisse (TIFF/Venice 2021) and the porn feature The Affairs of Lidia (2022), to prepare us for what was to come––certainly a visit one’d have a hard time forgetting. A reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s acclaimed 1968 film Teorema wherein a handsome, nameless man infiltrates a bourgeois family to then change their lives forever through sex. Naturally, Labruce would pay tribute to a film that’s already queer and treats sex as a political tool for change. Even more so, he’d do it much more explicitly (with porn), provocatively (with political critique), and playfully (with campy humor).

Labruce shapes his artistic practice through a continuous...