During a video interview with GQ in 2019, Willem Dafoe became a meme. “He’s gay,” Dafoe says, describing his character from The Boondock Saints. “But he has a special connection to classical music. There’s many things that are interesting about him.” It’s funny because of Dafoe’s delivery and the specific of classical music. But it’s also funny because the pause after “he’s gay” followed by only one other characteristic really prioritizes the gay of it all. Whether people used the audio to describe their cat or another beloved character, the emphasis was on the gayness.

Five years earlier, Dafoe played a different gay character: Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini in Abel Ferrera’s biopic Pasolini. If Dafoe had been describing this character instead he might’ve said, “He’s gay… But he was a devout Marxist who was brutally murdered by a far-right criminal organization.” There were many things that were interesting about him.

From his early Italian neorealist work to his bawdy Trilogy of Life to his controversial final film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s filmography is varied in narrative and tone. But his 1968 film Teorema is the one that has most frequently been cited and imitated in recent decades.

Teorema is about a mysterious young man who arrives in a bourgeois home and goes about seducing each member of the family one by one. After these sexual awakenings, the visitor leaves as suddenly as he appeared and each person is forever changed, no longer guarded by the conventions of bourgeois life.

Echoes of Teorema can be felt in films as varied as Charles Burnett’s singular To Sleep with Anger (1990) to questionable erotic thrillers like Poison Ivy (1992) to Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite (2019). But several films have gone further with a more direct mirroring of the plot. Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q (2001), Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman (2013), Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023), and Lin Jianjie’s Brief History of a Family (2024) have all transposed versions of this narrative onto their own unique cultures. And last month another film joined them with the most direct riff on Pasolini yet.

Queer filmmaking icon Bruce LaBruce’s new film The Visitor is the first of these films to be inspired by Pasolini’s form as well as his narrative. “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema — but it says everything!” exclaimed the film’s tagline, and yet this abstract, largely wordless storytelling has been consistently replaced with a more conventional approach in the films it inspired. Until now.

LaBruce’s film pulses with an exceptional electronic score from Hannah Holland. Its opening moments find several alien figures played by Black nonbinary performance artist Bishop Black emerging out of suitcases across London in tinted split screens. The only words spoken are Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech allowing LaBruce to be blunt in theme while maintaining narrative ambiguity.

As in Pasolini’s film, this visitor simply arrives at the home of this bourgeois family. There’s a brief explanation that he’s the guest of their maid, but there’s minimal effort to ground this in reality. The family welcomes the visitor out of exaggerated liberal guilt and the Teorema narrative begins. (Well, first, LaBruce pays tribute to Sàlo by having the family devour their new guest’s shit served hot on their fancy plates.)

While the sex in Teorema was shocking for its time, LaBruce attempts to make his version shocking for our own. The sex is graphic and unsimulated, oozing with fluids, and, occasionally, doubling up family members to include incest. It’s an admirable effort from LaBruce, but his increased queering of this story actually decreases its shock value.

Pasolini introduced his visitor into a normal bourgeois family — LaBruce introduces his into a drag version of the same. Father, mother, daughter, son all look about the same age and all look very visibly queer. The daughter is even played by transmasculine Ray Filar with visible facial hair. This removes the incongruity from the sex, allowing it to feel more like an inevitability than a disruption.

At first, this felt like a bold rewrite. If Pasolini aimed to critique the straight white bourgeois, LaBruce aimed instead at the queer white bourgeois. The destruction of the family has been updated to be the destruction of the chosen family.

But this reading falls apart when LaBruce betrays his commitment to Pasolini’s ambiguity with a speech from his visitor. “I am not your magical negro,” they say. “I am a pansexual revolutionary. Where I come from my powers are natural and commonplace.” As the speech continues, it’s clear we’re meant to view this queer sex as what has changed these straight characters.

The father says that he has transformed “from the possessor to the possessed” and LaBruce seems to believe this statement to be true. But is that what we’ve actually witnessed? Or did this white man just try bottoming for the first time?

Even without this speech that turns the critique away from white queers and places it back on the cishet bourgeois, the sexuality of the film fails in its purpose. In 1968, Pasolini’s pansexual visitor interrupted the conventions of this family through gay sex and extramarital sex. In 2025, we understand that sexual acts mean very little separate from identity and social standing.

Is sex the way for the visitor to disrupt this fictional family or the white queers playing them? Or is queer sex — regardless of top or bottom — something people in power enjoy from those they dehumanize all the time while remaining unchanged? The act of queer sex — or any sex — only means what the people involved ascribe to it. No act is inherently progressive, no act alters power dynamics once the orgasms have been achieved. To quote Angels in America, “Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.”

Commenting on a trope does not inherently mean avoiding that trope, and I’m at a loss how the visitor’s status as “pansexual revolutionary” changes the racial dynamics. This individual arrives, gives these people pleasure, and then allows them a new freedom. In Pasolini’s version, the family was largely left broken. Here, they seem reborn. This is made even more questionable by Bishop Black’s race and their character’s metaphorical representation of immigration. Even the most violently xenophobic members of the bourgeois have never been opposed to using immigrants for their own benefit.

Where LaBruce’s take on Teorema falters, another coming out later this year succeeds. Mariana Wainstein’s Linda also changes the identity of its visitor, making her a woman. But Wainstein understands that to change the identity of the character is to change the entire dynamic. If Linda were to have sex with every member of this bourgeois family, she’d merely be giving them what they want. Instead, her use of sexuality must include withholding.

Wainstein does allow for more of a plot explanation than Pasolini or LaBruce. While she remains mysterious, Linda arrives in this household to take over a maid job from her cousin who is ill. But in its own quiet way, Wainstein’s craft is just as controlled and precise as the other filmmakers. And her approach to story and theme is just as sharp as her formal skill.

The only member of the family Linda has sex with is the mother, because this is the only sexual act that will actually disrupt in a way that’s meaningful. With the father, she withholds completely. She puts on a blank face every time he flirts. With the son, she withholds while also establishing dominance. She refuses to let him disrespect her like he does everyone else. And with the daughter she flirts without consummation. To have sex with this teenager wouldn’t only be unethical, it would create an unruly bond. Instead, she leads her on just enough to ruin her belief that she’s a conventional heterosexual in love with her boyfriend.

While it’s not as formally abstract, Wainstein’s film is actually truer to Pasolini’s class satire. Instead of LaBruce’s on-the-nose politics, there’s a portrait of a family hiding their broken pieces within privilege. The dynamics are complex and upsetting, while never losing their eroticism.

Linda is a less overtly sexual film than The Visitor, and yet it more effectively uses its sex and its queerness. In other words: It’s gay… But it also has an understanding of class, race, and gender. There are many things that are interesting about it.

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