A stranger visits the home of an upper-class family in Milan. The silent visitor charms, seduces, and listens to the confessions of each family member in mute understanding (they exchange a mere 923 words between them). The film is a radical provocation to the bourgeois way of life – all these people do is wait expectantly for the arrival and attention of a higher power. And then this divine ragazzo descends upon them with a destructive love.

Just like the stranger with piercing azure blue eyes (played by Terence Stamp), so also Pier Paolo Pasolini holds many facets worth deciphering: a Marxist, playwright, and documentary filmmaker, one of Italy’s most significant poets, a disrupter of the canon, a slightly religious atheist who never hid his sexuality. This riddle-like fresco reveals an exercise in existentialism about the encounter between humans and the invincible. The main characters are portrayed by the most prominent actresses of European cinema at the time – Silvana Mangano, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky.