“I went to the porn cinema recently,” a friend tells me as we find our seats at the Dendy Newtown. “I get curious,” he continues, describing the cinema and its clientele while the ads are playing. Apparently the “gay room” was empty all but for one “creep,” so my gay friend went and sat with all the straight creeps in the not-gay porn room. He gets curious, you see.

The Dendy Newtown is not a porn cinema. But we are here to watch what is essentially as good as porn: punk pornographer Bruce LaBruce’s latest sexual pronunciamento The Visitor. The film borrows its premise from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 masterpiece Teorema, in which a mysterious, beautiful man (Terence Stamp) seduces every member of a wealthy Milanese family, as well as their maid, before disappearing without explanation.

Teorema was a film about edging in a time before blue balls. Upon its release, it was condemned and protested by the Vatican. With its stripped-down script of less than a thousand words, Teorema was not just a sexy, disquieting melodrama, however; it was a sharp political parable of the follies of the Italian bourgeoisie that had sex at its centre. With all this in mind, it’s unsurprising that LaBruce has made his entry in the long procession of filmmakers inspired by Pasolini and Teorema—after François Ozon’s Sitcom (1998) and Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q (2001). The revolution is his boyfriend after all.

The opening scene of The Visitor follows a homeless man with Bluetooth headphones sleeping rough on the riverbank. He is listening to the ravings of the populist conservative media, which bear an uncanny similarity to Donald Trump’s bizarre recent comments about “illegal aliens” and “transgender operations.” A suitcase has washed up on the shore. The baggage is unattended, perhaps once belonging to a traveller who has not made it to their destination safely. Was this traveller seeking asylum? Were they a runaway in exile? Then the suitcase begins writhing, with something living inside. A hand springs out and unzips the case, which opens to reveal a Black man (Bishop Black) wearing nothing but purple eyeshadow.

Not unlike the biblical story of little baby Moses in a basket on the River Nile, this mysterious Black figure has floated into the city of London while hiding comedically within a suitcase—the insinuation being that he made his entry into the United Kingdom unlawfully. With this, LaBruce creates a potent post-Brexit image to begin his film: the undocumented arrival of a foreigner. It’s basically porn for the xenophobic Tory imaginary—the invasion is happening from within the city’s borders! The significance of British maritime histories of arrival and departure is quickly distilled in this establishing scene. It is especially haunting when we remind ourselves that, during the transatlantic slave trade, many of the slaving voyages to West Africa were made from London through the same river that LaBruce’s visitor has floated in on.

According to LaBruce, sex has no borders. For the filmmaker, this exciting declaration becomes a rationale for The Visitor. In his corrupted facsimile of Teorema, a bourgeois family is led astray by the visitor following his arrival in their big, empty London home (the likes of which are only ever seen in porn). Unlike the original, which is enjoyed with bated breath, The Visitor makes this seduction explicit, with each member of the family liberated by a series of supposedly radical sex acts. Amidst the film’s glorious, unbridled fucking, LaBruce ejaculates mantras like: “OPEN BORDERS! OPEN LEGS!” And “EAT OUT THE RICH!” They flash capitalised on-screen in vibrant red. With every decree, LaBruce reveals his desperation to make political the sex which his film is obsessed with exposing. But if sex has no borders, what good is crossing the line?

While The Visitor distracts itself with sodomy, incest, and BDSM, its primary interest is in interracial-sex-as-transgression. The racial dimension of the film is built into the parable which it perverts; Stamp’s alien is swapped out for that of Black, a Black porn-star-turned-actor. What does it mean for the porno version of Teorema to be fixated on Blackness?

The Visitor looks to ‘Black Anality,’ a term coined by Black feminist writer and academic Jennifer C. Nash, where ‘Black’ and ‘anal’ are treated as one in the same. Think Charlotte Gainsbourg in the notorious threesome from Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol II (2013). Nash argues that ‘Black Anality’ is tied up in colonial understandings of cleanliness and waste, productivity and reproductivity. In his own way, LaBruce gestures towards these racist tropes of Black sexuality in his film, arguing for the anti-colonial potential of the sex he has choreographed. How, he probes, might the pornographic arthouse sexually liberate itself from fetishising the Black man in perpetuity?

Of course, questions of fetish and ethics continue to plague pornography and its production. With his latest film-festival-ready porno, LaBruce unironically invites his audience to “COLONISE THE COLONISER.” But with its impossible aspirations of moral cleanliness and safe desire, The Visitor goes the way of most ‘ethical’ porn: south! LaBruce skirts his own fascinations with race and sex by pointing to vague contemporary issues of anti-immigration politics while indulging fantasy tropes about interracial sex, cuckoldry, and the ‘big Black cock.’

Is it enough to just be entertained? LaBruce asks his audience to “KEEP CALM AND FUCK ON,” a misappropriation which nods to the British propaganda poster from World War II—the war that led Pasolini to Marxism. ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was devised by the government as a motivational campaign to uplift and reassure the British public in a time of profound social despair. Importantly, the image has remained in the public domain, meaning that its reproduction and imitation, even perversion in the case of The Visitor, have helped it to endure as a symbol of a national sentiment; surrender, stay in line, keep calm, and just hang in there.

But LaBruce is issuing a directive for the diametrical opposite with The Visitor. There is no way to keep calm while watching his film, what with all the graphic sex accompanied by strobe lights and thumping techno. “GET YOUR KNICKERS IN A TWIST!” Frantic confessions of wanting to make something radical interrupt horny entertainment. Ultimately, by relying too heavily on its punchlines, the film becomes a joke rather than a statement. Like a dog that can’t reconcile being neutered, The Visitor shamelessly humps taboo in the hope that it will affront and transgress. I wouldn’t even jerk off to it in a porn cinema. Sad!

The Visitor screened in September as part of this year’s Sydney Underground Film Festival.

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Charles Carrall is a writer and critic from Sydney, Australia. He makes up one half of the podcast Vanity Project.