In Pasolini’s cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness, Terence Stamp stars as a mysterious stranger who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family, 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.

(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, In Italian with w/ Eng sub, 98 min, 1968, Digital)

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