Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s The Visitor essay contains spoilers. Bruce LaBruce’s 2024 film features Bishop Black, Macklin Kowal and Amy Kingsmill. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

In an age where even the briefest of sex scenes can trigger insufferable discourse within a starved mainstream cinema culture, the defiantly underground work of Bruce LaBruce has retained its necessity. Long exploring sexual taboos in queer porn films at a time when the AIDS crisis made gay sex a taboo in and of itself, the Canadian filmmaker’s productions have maintained their transgressive edge, largely because they use sexuality to explore specific LGBTQ anxieties. For example, the director’s most notorious 21^st century work, L.A Zombie (2010), is fetish porn which could easily be interpreted as using horror movie markers of death as a way of confronting the paranoia around gay sex that still linger for the generations born in the years following the AIDS pandemic.

With The Visitor, LaBruce sets his sights on British society as a whole, encapsulating an entire decade’s worth of prejudice towards immigrants within the country’s politics and the media, satirically planting a quite-literally alien refugee to disrupt the sanctity of a white, upper-class family unit. It’s a remake of Pier Paolo Pasolinis Teorema (1968), but also an extension of the Italian filmmaker’s unapologetically queer, anti-fascist ethos, flipping the script of a movie like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) on its head, imagining a ruling social class that’s been sexually and morally corrupted by those lower down on the food chain, rather than just seduced by the mysterious new houseguest. The unnamed Visitor (Bishop Black) manages to coerce the family into drinking and eating his bodily waste, Salo-style (and with little effort), seconds after he’s introduced to them, which is depicted as the first of several moments of the repressed family’s gradual sexual revolution. There’s little plot to speak of in The Visitor, as the majority of the film depicts a different seduction and personal liberation, with every un-simulated sex scene overlaid with strobes and onscreen slogans (“Eat Out the Rich!” and “Incest Is Best… As Long As You Keep It in the Family” are two personal highlights) that ensure viewers could never regard the social satire as subtle.

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LaBruce attempted to reach a wider audience in the 2010s with films featuring no explicit sex, and The Visitor succeeds as a transgressive return to form, in equal parts funny and shocking (although, for this viewer at least, never titillating). However, what gives the film an edge is the blunt way in which it addresses the rising tide of far-right sentiments in the western world, a topic not ignored in cinema overall, but one that’s far more underserved in contemporary queer screen narratives than one might expect. Opening with a barrage of voiceover narration from an unseen talk radio host (who at times directly lifts quotes from the likes of Boris Johnson in his vitriolic screed against refugees), LaBruce doesn’t hide his disdain for the racist sentiment which has reached the mainstream, or a comfortable upper class who buys those narratives due to how sheltered they’ve become from the real world. These aren’t novel themes in themselves — with rich, well-researched narratives centering the refugee experience becoming commonplace on the festival and arthouse circuit — but they’re rarely made to be intersectional in this way, using the most surreal of starting points to dissect how one moral panic can trigger others.

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At the start of The Visitor, several identical bodies are shown emerging from rucksacks placed all over Britain, a nod to the enduring racist rhetoric of an “enemy within” society. The far-right frequently claims that Middle Eastern and African immigrants only come to western countries to assault the vulnerable, so placing a Black refugee in the home of a close-knit family is LaBruce’s delightfully distasteful way of preying on those racist fears. Through the act of sex, and the shattering of various taboos, the director heightens fears of how the “other” aims to subvert wholesome family values, pushing its social satire to a ridiculous extent that it begins feeling like a bigot’s feverish nightmare: that accepting others will lead to an immediate moral breakdown. As demonstrated by mainstream parties adopting far-right policies in the hope of winning over voters, all that accepting bigoted policies does is push extreme opponents even further right. If one vulnerable community is sufficiently marginalized by one act of legislation, then the far-right will move onto their next target.

In The Visitor, LaBruce shows that the unfounded fears of every “other” in a moral panic come back to the same place, depicted in a purely carnal sense through the lens of the immigrant experience. The supposed disintegration of British family life would likely be identical had the director opted for a lead of another religious denomination, gender, racial or class background. It’s an inherently ridiculous sentiment, regardless of the target, so why not have fun exposing it in the most over-the-top way you can?

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Because of the increasingly mainstream nature of LGBTQ screen narratives, queer stories in cinema are often divorced from a wider political context; there are rich dramas, genre films and coming-of-age tales but very few that directly grapple with the world around them. Almost every queer film of the 1980s and 1990s exist within the inescapable shadow of the AIDS crisis, either textually or otherwise, but a similarly looming threat to LGBTQ existence — the rise and normalization of the far-right — is watered down, if depicted at all. That it’s taken a silly hybrid of fetish pornography and Pasolini homage to begin unpacking the ruling class’s anxieties and prejudices that are shaping our cultural moment is still surprising; however, it’s not entirely without precedent. Radu Jude’s Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) feels like a companion piece of sorts, also utilizing un-simulated sex as the starting point of a wider tale of post-COVID malaise in socially conservative Romania. And much like LaBruce, Jude thinks subtle storytelling is for cowards, and his commentary (along with the subjects of his ire) are worn on his sleeve throughout the film.

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In contemporary queer cinema, there isn’t a work like The Visitor that’s even dared to tackle the wider-ranging relationships between disadvantaged communities on the receiving end of society’s scorn. It’s a rare and recent English film that offers a direct, wide-ranging commentary on the current cultural and political landscape, and still finds the time to challenge its audience with an unconventional approach to sexuality. The Visitor isn’t “perfect,” but at a time when the most renowned queer stories in cinema are more insular, personal tales, one that dares to be in conversation with the world around it (during such a volatile time) will make for an oddly enduring artifact.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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