Teorema

One of the most radical provocations from the iconoclastic PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom), Teorema finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. TERENCE STAMP (The Hit) stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons SILVANA MANGANO, MASSIMO GIROTTI, LAURA BETTI, and ANNE WIAZEMSKY), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.