Theorem

Theorem (Teorema, 1968) is Pier Paolo Pasolini's drama, available to watch online on iFILM. A nameless Visitor walks into the comfortable Milan home of a wealthy industrialist, and his mere presence is enough to crack the whole family open.

He grows close to all of them — the father, the wife, the daughter, the son, and the maid. Then, just as abruptly, he leaves. That's where the real film begins. Without him, each person is left alone with a void nothing can fill, and each breaks in a different direction: silence, rebellion, madness, sainthood. Terence Stamp plays the Visitor with barely a word; the entire script runs to just over nine hundred lines of dialogue.

Pasolini built a parable about what happens to the bourgeoisie once the object of desire is pulled out of their lives. The film took the OCIC prize from the Catholic film office and was almost immediately hit with obscenity charges, and arguments over it ran on for years. It's slow, dense with symbols, and deliberately cold — made for a viewer willing to read it as an equation rather than a story. Stream Theorem (1968) online on iFILM.