The Visitor (2025)
Directed by Bruce LaBruce
Screenplay by LaBruce, Alex Babboni, & Victor Fraga; based on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema
Starring Bishop Black, Macklin Kowal, Amy Kingsmill, Ray Filar, Kurtis Lincoln, & Luca Federici.

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

You’ve probably never seen anything quite like Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor, a retelling of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, which begins with a Black man, the Visitor (Bishop Black), washing up on the shore of the Thames in a suitcase before being taken in by a bourgeois family whose lives are altered on physical and metaphysical levels by the Visitor’s presence. What follows is a subversive, satirical take on British politics today, focused on the sexual and societal tensions that have long preoccupied England. LaBruce and his co-writers dive deep into White Britain’s long history of hatred towards those deemed Outsiders while focusing, often with vivid eroticism, on how a so-called homogenous culture like British culture—foolishness on its face since British identity encompasses the whole of the United Kingdom, which is itself four separate countries with distinct cultures—is freed from its conformity by ‘outside’ influence.

Some will watch The Visitor and be appalled by its brazen pornographic sequences. Others will watch and feel that LaBruce’s film gets lost in its own subversiveness. Yet still, more will watch The Visitor and see a masterful, angry, erotic film about a visitor from outside a culture revealing all the dirtiest crevasses of that culture’s mind. LaBruce’s The Visitor is a timely piece of cinema that wants to shake up the white, hetero-patriarchal order of Western societies and get you off in the process, as long as that post-nut clarity pushes you to take the revolution from the bedroom into the streets.LaBruce and co-writers Alex Babboni & Victor Fraga expertly satirise British politics by drawing from past and present to highlight how little has changed over the past 100 years. The Visitor begins with bits and pieces from Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, albeit paraphrased at times and mixed with two other important racist moments involving British leaders, one from the 1930s and another from the early 2000s: Boris Johnson’s article about then-Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting the Congo in which he wrote the following, “No doubt the AK–47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer–funded bird“; and Winston Churchill’s 1937 speech in favour of Zionism’s intent to let Jews settle in Palestine, during which Churchill said, “I do not admit . . . for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race—a higher–grace race, a more worldly race to put it that way—has come in and taken their place.” While Powell and Johnson are largely both known to be racist, Churchill is still touted as a wonderful man by many in and outside of Britain. It’s perhaps Churchill’s important status within the makeup of contemporary British identity that makes his own racism a perfect inclusion in The Visitor‘s mashup. Churchill has said many racist things over the years, though the inclusion of his 1937 speech is of particular significance since it was connected to Zionism, and, at the time of LaBruce’s film’s release, the destruction of Zionism—aided by the British government (and America’s, too)—continues to scar the world. The Visitor‘s use of Powell, Johnson, and Churchill connect white British nationalism’s past and present to illustrate how it continues to dominate the British psyche in 2025.

One aspect of not just British society but Western societies in general that The Visitor portrays is how the immigrant or simply non-white body is consumed in various ways, literalised in the first sequence where the Visitor pisses in a bucket, cuts his arm and bleeds into a container, then takes a shit on a platter, before all the contents of his body are brought to the dinner table where the family that takes the Visitor in proceed to feast on his bodily fluids and excretions. One family member describes the dinner’s taste as “exotic,” one of those words that’s long been a microaggression, meant to frame the non-white person and their culture as foreign, as not of this land, as separate from the dominant culture. An interesting analogy to the Visitor’s bodily fluids and excretions being consumed while the Powell-like speech giver rails on and on against those who aren’t white and British is the way in which Western societies have embraced the capitalist consumption of other cultures, especially Black culture (hip hop, African art and fashion, so on) but have continued to oppress the people from those same cultures. And then, of course, there’s all the sex the Visitor has with each member of the family, a series of cross-cultural and interracial exchanges of bodies, fluids, and experiences that alter every family member in a variety of ways. There are so many instances in everyday life across the UK where the contributions of cultures beyond British borders are evident, from late-night curry with chips feasted upon by drunken pub-goers in London and Chinese-influenced Irish spice bags, to literature, to music, and so, so much more. All the while white British nationalists turn up their nose at immigrants and refugees, creating dangerous myths about them, ignoring how they’ve contributed to and shaped British culture throughout history.
LaBruce’s The Visitor is easy to dismiss for those seeking a reason to because there’s a lot of focus on the explicit sex between the eponymous character and the bourgeois family that give him shelter. It’s easy for some to get lost in the fucking and sucking of it all—to get, dare I say, sucked into the deep, dark, lubricated holes The Visitor goes down. Aside from all the sociopolitical messages within LaBruce’s film, the sex itself is transgressive to the mainstream viewer and the heteronormative eye, as the Visitor has sex with each family member, regardless of gender; Ray Filar, who plays the Daughter, is actually non-binary, which adds a slight bit of realism to the film’s generally surreal vibe. LaBruce refuses any space where the viewer might want to try separating gender, sexuality, and the sociopolitical aspects of life by interspersing big flashing intertitles that read things like “EAT OUT THE RICH,” “OPEN BORDERS, OPEN LEGS,” “COLONISE THE COLONISER,” “SEX HAS NO BORDERS,” “GO HOMO!,” and “FUCK FOR THE MANY NOT FOR THE FEW” among other slogans, many of which satirise famous British slogans.
In a time when so many people lament what they believe is the politicising of identity, whether sexual, gender, or otherwise, LaBruce sees the inherent politics of various identities, and leans into the transformational power of non-normative identity within a constrictive society like the one white British nationalists envision for their nation. The Visitor is a powerful, erotic film that enthusiastically pushes back against Britain’s dominant white hetero-patriarchal culture, urging the viewer to look at the very idea of national culture from a different perspective, even if that perspective is face down, ass up.