Themroc (1973) User Reviews

I feel a cough coming on.

[ElijahCSkuggs · 8/10 · 6 January 2008]

A modern man turning into a caveman, and it's not related to Encino Man? Count me in. The first time I heard about Themroc it immediately spoke to me. I find the idea of a person re-evolving back into his previous state pretty damn cool. And when you see the cover with Themroc screaming, you know this could be a pretty good movie. Actually it was a very good movie.

If you haven't read anything about Themroc, the story is about a man who after years of the same daily routine is changing in a pretty bizarre way. His day usually starts this way: Wakes up, makes coffee, sees his mother(?) point at the clock telling him to get a move on, sees a girl (no idea the relation) naked, walks down his steps always passing the same attractive woman, rides his bike to work, hits the work locker room and begins his day. Well, the day starts off the same but Themroc(?) has this little cough going on, but isn't really a clue to him getting a cold, but actually the start of him reverting back to caveman ways. Eventually the cough turns into yells and groans. What follows is an entertaining look at how this modern caveman interacts with people and his surroundings.

Going into Themroc I didn't know that much about how the story would play. I kinda expected a dark film with more violence, but what you really get is a dark comedy, with more sexual themes than violent ones. Unfortunately Themroc suffers from repetitiveness. The movie slightly drags in a few scenes, but since the movie's idea is so unique you're always expecting something surprising to happen. You do get a few nice surprises, but you also do feel a sense of repetition. Also the approach to showing a modern caveman in this manner would cause massive chaos and would be dealt with in a much more harsh manner. And during the film I thought to myself a lot that it's pretty unrealistic, but for the ending to work, it had to go this way. And that's fine with me.

Themroc was well worth the wait. When he's making that change into the Caveman state, and he's about half way there, so he's groaning/grunting and yelling, but at the same time he's still attempting to be civilized. That stuff is pretty damn funny. Overall Themroc is a unique flick that most movie buffs should check out. It's entertaining, funny, well-acted and definitely different. If you get the chance to see this rare gem, check it out.

THEMROC (Claude Faraldo, 1973) ***

[Bunuel1976 · 7/10 · 20 January 2009]

This is mainly noted for having no intelligible dialogue throughout: given its considerable length (105 minutes) and essential plotlessness, though, the series of grunts, growls, groans and other gibberish uttered by all the characters involved does become wearying after a while. Nevertheless, it's a good example of the risks that film-makers were willing to take (and generally manage to pull off) during this most creative era in World Cinema; curiously enough, for being virtually a Silent film with barely established characters, this has one of the longest cast lists I've ever seen! THEMROC revolves around a laborer (Michel Piccoli) who goes berserk after getting the sack from work: he sleeps with his sister and destroys his apartment and, after the initial astonishment, his neighbors get the same anarchic bug. This streak of non-conformism also extends to sex (with plenty of non-graphic nudity on display), as Piccoli contrives to elicit uninhibited behavior from many of the females (be they nubile or frustrated) around him – including the secretary, Marilu' Tolo, he had been caught unwittingly peeping on and subsequently seduced. Despite the occasional brutality, police intervention in the matter largely proves ineffectual. Though the point of it all is obscure – unless it's that one needs to revert to some form of primeval state in order to survive the exigencies of the modern world – a handful of situations which crop up are definitely amusing: Piccoli and policeman Patrick Dewaere engaging in a tit-for-tat routine while the latter is rebuilding the façade of his apartment; feeling liberated, a victimized wife tries to assert herself and finally escapes her husband's tyranny through the window when he's not looking; a man spends practically the entire film lovingly washing his car but, then, at the very end he joins in the chaos by nonchalantly taking a sledge-hammer to it. Still, when all is said and done, the best thing about the film is its extraordinary fragmented editing.

They don't make them like this anymore

[matthew-54 · 20 July 1999]

A great film. Woefully cheap. Blissfully purposeful. Knows exactly what it thinks and says it with brutal clarity and biting humour, all shot in a ragged verité style that seems strangely contemporary. A factory worker goes off his trolley, throws society's rulebook out of the window and reverts to being a caveman. And that's about it - talk about a high concept! There's no dialogue, only gibberish and grunts, but, incredibly, it works. It's easy not to like this film, but hard not to be impressed by it. Check it out for yourself and see.

Anarchist assault

[robtclements · 10/10 · 17 August 2003]

In a time when blind respect for anyone with the arrogance to call themselves an authority has reached plague proportions, we need to rediscover Claude Faraldo's anarchist assault Themroc as a matter of extreme urgency. Whether as a surrealistic revenge fantasy that makes Dirty Harry look like Kindergarden Cop or simply as one of the funniest films ever made, the film takes nothing seriously (least of all itself) as it sets out to outrage every convention of decent law abiding filmmaking ever unwritten. It's hard to choose just one pristine moment to symbolise this work - peraps the gendarme's blind pride in the stupidity of his uniform just before he becomes Themroc's latest meal; or possibly Michel Piccoli's curious assistance in his own death as his cave family are carefully walled in - but the work is blistering in its uncompromising joyous anti-logic. Commercial traditionalists like Bunuel may have made newer - even angrier - statements; but noone has ever revelled in their own extremism than Faraldo. The sooner it turns up on DVD, the better.

amazing, one of a kind

[joethelilman · 10/10 · 31 October 2007]

a film which is so different in one of the best ways ever... a breath of fresh air, made just after riots in Paris in the 70's the film uses sexual tensions to portray the suppressed feeling of most parisians at the time. themroc himself, is a man who lives a repetitive life, constantly dealing with the everyday struggles of work and no play, breaks from his neash to turn in to a free man/monster who breaks down all barriers(quite literally) and brings a feeling of liberty to his community despite the police trying their best to stop and ever kill him. his path brings sex, demolition, canabolism, adultery, incest and murder to name a few... all with only about 20words said throughout the who thing a film for every film lover to watch. seriously recommended

An amusing, surreal, relentless satirical swipe at the banality of the rat race

[Afracious · 10/10 · 5 January 2001]

The excellent Michel Piccoli (La Grande Bouffe; The Phantom of Liberty) plays Themroc. Themroc lives with his mother and sister in a depressing flat, where the monotonous silence is only broken by a cuckoo clock. Themroc's day begins with a bicycle ride to the railway station, then a train ride to his workplace.

At his works, Themroc goes into a locker room with the other men. They then split into two groups; one group wearing white overalls, the other wearing yellow. Each overall has an image of a man painting on the back. The two groups then quarrel in gibberish, some even seem to be squabbling with their lockers.

Work then begins. The men start to paint an iron fence. One of the groups use white paint, the other uses black (on the same fence.) Which colour wins? Themroc is then up a ladder, and caught peering through the window at his boss and secretary. His boss opens the window, and bangs Themroc on his nose, bloodying it. His boss demands to see him. He waits outside his office, and watches a man sharpening different coloured pencils. The pencils are put in two rows, one at the top, one at the bottom. The man sharpens the pencils from the top line, breaks the tip, then puts them on the bottom row.

Themroc is fired by his boss. He goes into a toilet cubicle and grunts and growls loudly, like a mad dog. On his way home he enters a subway station. He walks down the line into the tunnel, howling at the passing trains. Themroc arrives home, and is greeted at the door by his sister, who has her breast showing. He fondles her, and she seems to like it. He then gets a sledgehammer and knocks a huge hole in the wall of his flat. He throws out his television and other appliances onto the forecourt below. He enters and leaves his flat via a rope ladder dangling from the hole. Soon, other neighbours start to knock holes in their walls too.

The police eventually arrive, some in riot gear. Themroc and his sister throw anything they can find in the house at them in the forecourt below. The police throw tear gas cannisters in Themroc's flat, but he soon gets rid of them; and gleefully throws them back and forth with his neighbours, who are all now behaving like Themroc.

The police then leave. Themroc manages to capture a policeman at night. He takes the officer to his flat, and then all the neighbours gather round, and cook and feast on him; although the carcass shown is amusingly a pig's. A builder then arrives at, and tries to build a wall over the hole. Themroc jests with him, and persuades him to kick it down after two layers are built. Throughout the film a man is polishing his car near the forecourt, almost oblivious to the proceedings. He now takes a sledgehammer and destroys his car. Themroc and his neighbours are all groaning loudly. The incessant banal rat race begins again.

experimental, cutting edge and mediocre crap!

[george-crowther · 5/10 · 14 January 2008]

Reading great reviews on this film made me curious enough to fork out £15 on a German import. I really wanted to like this film I've always prided myself on sniffing out obscure and surreal films, yet after sitting through this film and nodding off a few times towards the end I can't understand why it rates so highly. Some call it a satirical look at the mundane routine of everyday life and mans need to release their inner cave man. Personally I think it's cr*p I have given it a 5 because it IS different but that doesn't make it good not by a long shot. It's the kind of film that some channel 4 lefty still tripping from the sixties may want to sit down and discuss over a bad cup of coffee with a couple of equally smarmy beret wearing bottom feeders, prattling on about the directors need to primal scream his inner angst.

Save your money but most importantly save your brain cells.....

Captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt ...

[unruhlee · 10/10 · 27 December 2006]

This film is hilarious. It is inspiring. It captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt of one man who "goes mad" against authority in every form.

It's interesting that the strategy of liberation in the film revolves around a very personal and playful attack on the architecture most immediate to our lives. This destruction and transformation of space is accompanied by a kind of sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois family dynamics in a contagious way. Readers may recognize the resonance of these themes with the theory and agitation of the Situationist International, the revolutionary / avant-garde organization credited with sparking the revolt of May 1968 in France. Five years previous to Themroc's release, millions of people actually did occupy public spaces including universities and factories, creating "passionally superior ambiances" in many cases, armed to a significant extent with Situationist ideas, graffiti slogans from which plastered Paris.

Not that seeing Themroc is any substitute for actively engaging the rigorous revolutionary theory of the S.I. (see www.bopsecrets.org). But the film is in a way a dream-like rendition of the Situationist vision of changing life. And in fact, there is a passing reference to Themroc in "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", a film by Situationist René Vienet: when the hero of that film is confronting the "bureaucrats", some onlookers comment something to the effect that "wow, that guy must have seen Themroc."

Avant-garde?Isn't it the French word for c...?

[dbdumonteil · 1/10 · 20 January 2002]

That's what John Lennon once said.

Themroc is would be avant-garde,but only for these who have a short memory.Take the beginning of the movie:these herds going to work ,the hero's tiny and seedy flat,they already were in King Vidor's "the crowd" (1928).

Actually Claude Faraldo contents himself with recycling the most dated clichés of the post May 68 era:down with the bosses,power to the people,kill (and eat) the cops,this is a brand new life ,opportunity knocks,make love not war,we are the good guys,the others are the villains,please get out of the new road if you can't lend a hand,and so on.Spitting on the cops was so à la mode that Faraldo could not be wrong while speaking to the intellectual post 68 elite :humble people are actually demeaned in his film.

How to attract people's attention?Which form should he use? That's Faraldo's lucky break!No form at all, a formless product.So it seems that he has filmed haphazardly,then asked his editor to work in a "surrealistic " way(He was not aware that Luis Bunuel had already done that ,as far as editing is concerned- un chien andalou (1928) l'âge d'or (1930);his movies were as subversive as Faraldo's ,and at a time when it was not that much trendy.Bunuel wasn't born to follow).

People who like this -and they seem to be quite a lot- should catch Jacques Doillon 's "l'an 01",which deals with the same clichés,but which is less pretentious :it could be,relatively speaking,a seventies update of Jean Renoir's "la vie est à nous" (1936).

Deeply political and a great commentary on humans and our wester society

[gryspnik · 10/10 · 21 November 2006]

It is obvious that words, wonderful photography, direction and profound lessons are not needed in a film in order for it to pass its messages across to its viewers. Themroc is a movie with no dialogue so that it can be seen by any human around the world and still understand how authority has separated us and divided us in order to use us. Themroc is an ode to symbolism, a prime example of how you can do political commentary and show to people that freedom is easy to attain and that half measures is the mean authority uses to control us. More than that, Themroc examines human sexuality, sexism, exploitation and the limitations modern society has set for us thus limiting our life experience and happiness.

I absolutely recommend watching it if you manage to fin this film. 10/10

A great image of our tragic state of life

[molllev · 9/10 · 17 August 2010]

I wonder why none of the reviews are attending us on that unforgettable, tragic last pictures of the movie: a deadly frozen world, their arms in vain stretched outside through the gaps in the prisoning wall; in silence lost screaming by human beings whose irrealism did not succeed in their hopeful but anarchistic fighting for an authentic natural life; caught back worse than ever before in a senseless but common life: our daily world without real communicative language. The movie is a great piece of art, a forceful protest, biting but humorous as well, against an inhumane way of one-dimensional existing. Yes, in the spirit of those years, the seventies (Marcuse!); but transcending that time in deeply moving images, a huge everlasting metaphor of human existence in a world of scattered hope for Sense and Quality.

Testing the power of Themroc

[j-b-w-1 · 3 June 2007]

Themroc has been dumped on the market in the North West of England. The Warner Brothers VHS tape has appeared in dozens of copies in bargain outlets. So have Buñuel's Tristana and Visconti's Senso, come to that, but their transformative power may be less potent.

We still await reports that pound-store customers are roasting cops and sniffing tear-gas for kicks. As for humping their sisters, we never suspected anything less of them.

Warners promise English subtitles, which would have been de trop. Collectors of unusual aspect-ratios may care to note it is cited as 1.53:1

It's a romantic tale, though. The modern Themroc would be a short, stopped by a high- powered bullet about half an hour in.

must be seen!!!

[kcool · 10/10 · 22 October 2001]

I saw this movie back in the seventies and I can't forget it.

This movie rules. I must be the best film I have ever seen. We are all animals, even if we chose to think of ourselves as something more divine than a common ape. Watch this movie and open your eyes.

Too wierd for its own good.

[zxzxzxzx · 1/10 · 31 January 1999]

Can a movie that sets itself up as being strange, over the top and generally whacky, still be too weird? Answer-YES! Too much of a bad thing does not make it worth the time to watch. Go rent "Eraserhead" instead.

This Movie Rules

[ErMi · 10/10 · 23 September 1998]

I do not know why, but in my opinion this movie is the best i have ever seen...watch IT !!!

Flawed, but competently directed

[brianberta · 5/10 · 11 June 2021]

This wasn't an easy watch, but even though it's a hard film to recommend, I did enjoy a couple things about it and thought it was competently directed.

To get my issues out of the way, I thought many scenes dragged on for too long. While the film became more watchable and focused once Themroc started destroying his apartment, I also thought many scenes throughout the final hour or so could've been tightened up. The initial conflict with the police, Themroc interfering with a man laying bricks outside his apartment, and the final scene made for some nice humor, but I didn't find these scenes as humorous as the movie did. More often than not, sequences like these overstayed their welcome, in part due to the film's one dimensional themes. I also didn't care for the frequent female nudity. The constant nude shots of Themroc's sister were unnecessary and got tiring after a while. In fact, the film contained no male nudity to balance any of this out. Like, yeah, there were a few scenes where it showed some male actors with no clothes on, but they were only shown from the waist up, at most.

In spite of those issues though, I'd still give this film a loose recommendation. As mentioned earlier, its themes on rebelling against society are one dimensional, but I did find the exploration of this one dimension amusing at times, with its one note constantly increasing in weirdness as it rolled along. My favorite part of the final hour was watching Themroc's apartment and the streets below him grow progressively more beaten up and polluted. It recalled the second part of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks with how this progression made the film feel post-apocalyptic. I also found the incompetence of the police quite humorous, failing to stop Themroc multiple times and oftentimes simply standing around as he and his neighbors destroyed more things.

Overall, while this film is flawed, I enjoyed enough about it to think it was competent. I don't know of many people I'd recommend this to, but if you enjoy these kinds of films, I'd recommend giving it a go.

A real curiosity

[rband · 5 June 2000]

I saw this movie while I was living in Germany in 1975 and absolutely LOVED it - but of course, that was 25 years ago. I've searched in vain for it since, I don't think it's ever been shown in the States.

Note to the distributor: there's an opportunity for it in the art houses on this side of the Atlantic - granted Americans are generally much more prudish than Europeans, but I think we're sufficiently post-PC (politically correct) that it would have a chance at a good reception.

Regressive and wild, Piccoli's best..!!

[samxxxul · 9/10 · 9 July 2020]

A factory worker who, one morning, fed up with the routine of his work, decides to abandon the conventions of civilization and live primitively in the city kind of human caveman, expressing himself through grunts. He expresses dehumanization through routine and anarchism signifying the return of the human being, who rejects modern society from its root, to its primitive nature is explained by the 'representation' of wolves, hunts, and ultimately howling wolves.

Directed by truck-driver-turned-filmmaker Claude Faraldo, a French film composed entirely of nonsensical dialogue which is completely bizarre, but weirdly intriguing. The film works as absurd comedy and social criticism at the same time. Pure anarchism and demolition of the values of the modern world through a wild surreal mockery, sounding like a Grindcore album in it's runtime.

Among the roles of Michel Piccoli's impressive career in theatre and cinema, my all-time favourite remains the "THEMROC" (1973) who constantly cries out, growls, screams and repeats incomprehensible acts and vandalism as if he wanted to explode the hypocritical harmony of modern society. RIP Michel Piccoli.

A rebellious, shocking, sicken, comedy

[RodrigAndrisan · 9/10 · 24 April 2016]

I always tried to find and watch revolutionary films, fresh and absolutely original. Which is very hard to find. But not impossible. Who seeks finds! And I found this Themroc (1973), directed by Claude Faraldo. A true challenge to make a feature film without any bit of dialogue, only moans, howls, whimpers and a lot of belching, roar and shouting. Michel Piccoli, who is an excellent actor, is the perfect choice for the character that gives the title of the film. That same year, 1973, Piccoli played himself in Marco Ferreri's masterpiece, La Grande Bouffe. Both characters have something in common, that unique and complete naturalness of the actor. All the other actors (including Miou-Miou, Coluche) are very good, specially in the way they express themselves in sulking French. It is still a movie for a certain category of viewers, those incorrigible fools or refined connoisseurs.

An antidote to Cinema.

[botavuan · 10/10 · 5 April 2022]

A splendid absurdist-nihilist (and inevitably self-indulgent) satire on (the self-indulgence of) cinema itself. It should be watched by all cinéastes.

Awful movie

[Stevemovieguy · 2/10 · 1 May 2021]

I watched Themroc (1973) today for the first time. Directed by Claude Faraldo, the film has no understandable dialogue. There is only sounds and minimal grunts and gibberish. This is an interesting approach, but unfortunately did not work for me. At all. To pull this off, you have a really interesting story. I didn't find the story in Themroc interesting or entertaining on any level. I was not impressed by the performances and the found the characters dull and severely underdeveloped. The film dragged on and on for what felt like a long time and I was bored for much of it. This is one of the worst films I have seen in years.

Pretentious, but I loved it at the time

[mckennab · 1 December 2000]

I too watched this movie over 20 years ago - it was shown at the student film night at college in England. I loved it at the time and would like a chance to see it again.

I viewed it as an absurdist black comedy, but I'm sure the director had some serious socio-political axe to grind. I liked the fence painting scene and found the spit roasting of a cop (pig - geddit?) wonderfully tasteless

The Human Rights Watch would give this thumbs up. For once we agree.

[fedor8 · 12 January 2009]

It was truly amazing/amusing to read some of the pretentious, wanna-be pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook some people wrote about "Themroc". Clearly, this story excited quite a few of society's misfits, losers, and Marxist misanthropes because of its anarchistic attitude. They identify with the main character because, just like him, they are too weak to take the pressure of modern life so they seek out Che Guevara, Sid Vicious, or even G.G. Allin as guiding lights, mocking anyone who is content, hard-working, or successful in this oh-so evil Capitalist world they live in. (Ayn Rand refers to those types as "moochers". She was being kind.)

So naturally such viewers read everything into the movie that they wanted to read into it. I.e. that it's meant to about Western decadence, police brutality, 1968, bla bla bla. (If anything, there should be MORE police brutality, especially on May 1st.) With "Themroc", making these kinds of very personal (read: deluded) interpretations is very easy: the movie has no dialogue, at least nothing apart from various grunts and groans - which is how Leftist pumpkins sound to ME when they expose their ignorance by over-rationalizing the events in movies such as this one.

Piccoli is very good as the labourer-turned-Neanderthal, in what is one of the most bizarre movies I've seen. A totally obscure little oddity that is a million times harder to find than any Godard or Truffaut. Unfortunate, because this happens to be one of the best French movies ever made. Forget all those supposedly brilliant, hilariously overrated French/Euro-trash politically-coloured "character-study" dramas; THIS film is worth your attention - unless you're squeamish, that is. There is incest, there is cannibalism, and other unsavory stuff going on. And yet, the movie is part-comedy. It is not to be taken too seriously. The visual look, that somewhat grainy 70s feel, also contributes to the quality.

More a series of assorted provocations than a meaningfully sustained vision

[philosopherjack · 29 March 2024]

Claude Faraldo's Themroc is likely to strike you more as a connected series of assorted provocations than as a meaningfully sustained vision, with an occasional sense of throwing stuff out to see how much sticks: happily, it works better than might have been expected. Broadly summarized, the film follows a blue-collar painter (Michel Piccoli) who one day snaps and starts trashing his apartment, inspiring a few others in adjacent buildings to follow suit, with the authorities largely powerless to intervene; he also has sex with his sister, among others, perhaps engages in cannibalism, and in general arrives at, at least for the short term, an alternative, seemingly satisfying mode of living. The film is set in a version of then present-day France, providing ample footage of drab-looking, bottled-up people stuck in dull and repetitive lives, much that could be either documentary or a Candid Camera-style bending of it, but strangified by the absence of any intelligible dialogue: on the few occasions that people speak at all, they do so in grunts or shrieks or streams of gobbledygook. The casting of Piccoli with his impeccable art-film resonance certainly adds to the intrigue of the film's implied puzzle, especially when supplemented with that of Beatrice Romand (from Rohmer's Claire's Knee!) as the almost perpetually half-naked sister: the two ensure that there's a strange delicacy at the heart of the chaos. It finds its final flourish in the film's sweetest sequence, in which they gently seduce a bricklayer (Patrick Dewaere) who's working on repairing a wall, luring him into joining them in kicking down his own handiwork and in the subsequent sexual ecstasy. Ultimately, the film doesn't have too much to offer as analysis or diagnosis or social prescription, but the weirdly deliberate specificity of the whole thing easily keeps boredom at bay.