Critics reviews

A classic, seminal text of interloper cinema, his 1968 metaphysical foreplay remains as mysteriously ingenious today as it did in upon a reception which focused on its flamboyant titillations, earning it a charge of degeneracy and banned by the Catholic Church.

[Pasolini] never commits to anything so easily reducible as a condemnation of Teorema’s central family... the atheist, anti-bourgeois filmmaker grants the family a visitation, maybe from something beyond their understanding, and even as he plots out their subsequent ruination, corruption, or debasement, it’s evident in the attitudes and weighted imagery in the film that he feels it. He feels all of it.

As is so often the case with Pasolini’s cinema, Teorema resists systematic interpretation, despite the logical approach promised by its title. Though the film’s structure appears as methodical as the proof of a mathematical theorem... Teorema remains equivocal in its meanings... [and it] proved another emblem of Pasolini’s artistic martyrdom.

The significance of the changes displayed by the family members are shown in amusing, sometimes brutal detail, but never judged. It's like a cinematic explosion, where the shards of rubble are just left to smoulder in the middle distance. Take the film as an inscrutable objet d'art which any theory you care to throw at it will probably stick, and you're left with a film which is as eccentrically entertaining as it is entirely baffling.

[Theorem] is bizarre, playful and mysterious, an absurdist Noh cinema with a dash of proto-Pythonesque surrealism... It is exhilaratingly, even gloriously experimental in a way that hasn't dated.

Banned in its native Italy for its overt sexual nature – tame, of course, by today’s standards – Theorem remains one of Pasolini’s most satisfying works, thanks in no small part to a magnificent supporting cast, including a quite sublime Silvana Mangano.

A political allegory with spiritual knobs on, [Theorem] is hilarious, confrontational and as resonant as ever today, as our own middle class dominates the social spectrum, consumerism their credo. Pasolini today would have a ball.

As a viewing experience, [Theorem is] surprisingly low key. Yet the film’s conviction is truly defiant, its implications provocative across the board. A bonafide icon of ’60s world cinema.

An exemplary, beautiful and strange doorway into the heart of Pasolini... Not a conventional chronicle of bourgeois depravity like, say, Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette, Theorem asks more troubling, cosmic questions: principally, does the enslaved mind crave liberation or does it fear and despise it?

Apart from his scandalous Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom, 1975 – another film with spiritually induced levitation -– this shocking 1968 feature, Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film with a contemporary setting, may be his most controversial work, displaying the kind of audacity and excesses that send some audiences into gales of defensive, self-protective laughter.

The whole ambience of Teorema as a hard-to-read allegory, not ‘obscure’ or mysterious or multi-levelled in the standard art-cinema sense, but, on the contrary, something brutish, literal, intractable – so very there, on the surface, but glacially so... [The film] looks forward to Salò: it’s something that can’t be easily consumed.

My guess is that "Teorema" is a watershed of some kind, a film out of its own time, a film nothing has prepared us for, but a film that in years to come will be seen as a turning point like early Godard... [The film] has the power at some subterranean level to remain in your memory long after you think you've dismissed it.