‘The Visitor’ Review: Bruce LaBruce’s Blazing Middle Finger to Bourgeois Society

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 for contemporary London and the Visitor (Bishop Black) is a Black man, one of many identical alien figures that have mysteriously started emerging all over the city out of large travel bags.

As the Visitor that this story will follow washes up on the shore of the River Thames while a reactionary radio host spews anti-immigrant rhetoric on the soundtrack, the film immediately sets the xenophobic attitudes of white Britons in its crosshairs. If LaBruce’s long-time outsider punk credentials weren’t already clear, the thumping beats of Hannah Holland’s electronic score also announces that The Visitor will be a singularly energetic middle finger to power structures.

The Visitor finds his way to a boxy McMansion and is quickly ushered in by the Maid (Luca Federici), at which point the film wastes no time obliterating the boundaries of conventional good taste. And LaBruce both honors and furthers the shock value that Pasolini delivered across his work, kicking things off with a coprophagic dinner extraordinaire that pays tribute to the Italian auteur’s still-controversial Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

The Maid and the Visitor conspire to serve the home’s occupants—consisting of the materialistic Mother (Amy Kingsmill), the serious-minded Father (Macklin Kowal), the social-media-obsessed Daughter (Ray Filar), and disaffected DJ Son (Kurtis Lincoln)—a dinner of urine and feces. The family members, though, are so taken by the Visitor, who’s introduced to them as the Maid’s nephew, that they barely bat an eye at the foul meal, leering lasciviously at their new guest/servant while they eagerly and sloppily consume his shit.

LaBruce has always straddled the line between pornography and arthouse cinema, and here he emphatically depicts sex as nothing less than an insurgent act. As the Visitor, possessing an almost supernatural sexual stamina (or perhaps extraterrestrial, judging from all the resultant goo), beds his way through the family, the film is refreshingly inclusive in its portrayal of sex across its extended unsimulated sex scenes, which are as darkly sensual as they are amusingly playful. Assisting in the provocatively seductive choreography is the film’s intimacy coordinator, Lidia Ravviso, and her large emphatic credit spot in the opening titles stands as a revolutionary statement on its own amid a current climate of undue skepticism toward the profession.

LaBruce, tongue firmly planted in cheek, intersperses title cards with all the sex acts depicted on screen, proclaiming twisted slogans like “Eat Out The Rich,” “Invade My Ass,” and “Incest Is Best.” Elsewhere, The Visitor turns Teorema’s subtext into scathingly funny text, most audaciously in another dinner scene where each family member confesses their social misdeeds in the face of the Visitor’s sudden announcement of his departure. “You have colonised the coloniser,” the Father stoically says, summing up his newfound enlightenment.

Through it all, the actors are all admirably in sync with LaBruce’s camp wavelength, dialling up the caricaturish tenor of their performances and relishing the deliciousness of dialogue like “You opened my legs…and my heart.” In contrast to the film’s more parodic intentions, Black’s Visitor serves as an alluringly charismatic counterpart, a self-proclaimed “pan-sexual freedom fighter” whose magnetic carnality practically radiates off the screen.

Once the Visitor takes his leave, the family members’ subsequent breakdowns mirror the denouement of Teorema, as they desperately try to fill more than just the gaping void left in their hearts. For example, after the bare-naked Father wanders the streets of London and ends up in an abandoned yard, he encounters a large sign that reads, in block letters, “CAPITALISM,” at which point he proceeds to vigorously fuck the letter L. The political commentary is blunt but effective, as The Visitor ultimately posits a vision of transcendence through anarchy, seeing repression as the enemy of social progress. If this sentiment isn’t exactly new, the suggestion that everyone would do well to get a little more in touch with their inner freak still feels radical at a time when society continues to capitulate to that which oppresses them.