1968 | Italy | Fiction

Teorema (Theorem)

  • Italian, French English 98 mins
  • Director | Pier Paolo Pasolini
  • Writer | Pier Paolo Pasolini
  • Producer | Franco Rossellini, Manolo Bolognini

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

With Teorema, a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness, Pier Paolo Pasolini moved beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown. Terence Stamp 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, 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.

Drama Art Erotic Philosophy Mystery
Film Organizations
The Criterion Collection
DISTRIBUTION