The Shout (1978, Jerzy Skolimowski) (Patreon)

30/100

Answers the unasked question: Would I still have liked Teorema had its mysterious visitor targeted a lone couple, cucking the husband via extremely stupid mystical powers (acquired from aborigines in the Australian outback, for that soupçon of racism)? As you may have gathered from my rating, that'd be a decisive No. Granted, the framing story deliberately undermines some of Crossley's bullshit, suggesting that we, alongside Tim Curry, are merely hearing a lunatic's rant; nonetheless, I don't see how it's possible to enjoy The Shout unless you get off to some degree on watching an ineffectual man's humiliation by someone far more potent (which is compellingly complicated, if my memory from 16 years ago can be trusted, in Pasolini's pansexual roundelay.) There's just not much else going on in what quickly becomes a repetitive three-hander—one that reduces Susannah York to a frequently nude sexual object—and the pretension level eventually transformed me into Dieter: "Your quietly contemptuous intensity has grown tiresome. Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!" Was curious to hear what Skolimowski and his sound team would do with Crossley's homicidal bellow, given the otherwise seemingly irrelevant interludes detailing Anthony's experiments in recording offbeat sound effects (is he an avant-garde musician? if so, that's not at all clear), but the result, in terms of generating unease from wide open mouth + horrific sound, runs a very poor second to Kaufman's Body Snatchers remake from that same year. (Doesn't help that Skolimowski initially shoots the scream from an angle that foregrounds Bates' numerous gold caps.) Very much the kind of European psychosexual drama from this era—Roeg's Eureka is another recently-seen-by-me example, though I guess that's partially American—that others find fascinatingly enigmatic but that to my eyes just seems extravagantly dumb.