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The vapid bourgeois class will always be prime fodder for a ribbing in a world that continues to be systematically dismantled by capitalist oligarchies. Case in point: The Visitor, Bruce Labruce’s hilariously deranged art-porn reimagining of Teorema, proves that the Canadian provocateur is the ideal person to bring Pier Paolo Pasolini’s subversive spirit into the present. While there’s been no shortage of arch “eat the rich” satires in recent years, none have hit their target with the kind of renegade perversity that Labruce has spent his career gleefully discharging, something that arguably reaches its apex in this sicko family affair.

The Visitor hews close to Teorema’s sparse narrative template, with its title character arriving at the home of an upper-class family and seducing each member one by one before abruptly leaving them in a state of existential despair. This time, though, the Milan setting is swapped...

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...