Movies like Theorem
If Theorem hooked you with its mystery and drama, these are the films to watch next. Every pick says why it matches.
Blow-Up (1966)
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & mystery
Worth the HypeMovies like thisL'Avventura (1960)
Claudia and Anna join Anna's lover, Sandro, on a boat trip to a remote volcanic island. When Anna goes missing, a search is launched. In the meantime, Sandro and Claudia become involved in a romance despite Anna's disappearance, though the relationship suffers from guilt and tension.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & mystery
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRed Desert (1964)
In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Damned (1969)
In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisDeath in Venice (1971)
Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisIl bell'Antonio (1960)
Problems arise for Antonio Magnano when he is unable to consummate his marriage to the beautiful Barbara Puglisi and his virility is called into question. Despite the fact that he loves his beautiful wife and they have otherwise been happily married for a year, his problem becomes a source of contention for all concerned.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLove and Anger (1969)
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Accattone (1961)
A pimp with no other means to provide for himself finds his life spiralling out of control when his prostitute is sent to prison.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLa Notte (1961)
A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship in Milan.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisJuliet of the Spirits (1965)
Middle-aged Giulietta grows suspicious of her husband, Giorgio, when his behavior grows increasingly questionable. One night when Giorgio initiates a seance amongst his friends, Giulietta gets in touch with spirits and learns more about herself and her painful past. Slightly skeptical, but intrigued, she visits a mystic who gives her more information -- and nudges her toward the realization that her husband is indeed a philanderer.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSatyricon (1969)
After his young lover, Gitone, leaves him for another man, Encolpio decides to kill himself, but a sudden earthquake destroys his home before he has a chance to do so. Now wandering around Rome in the time of Nero, Encolpio encounters one bizarre and surreal scene after another.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Spider's Stratagem (1970)
A young man returns to his countryside hometown to investigate the unclear circumstances behind the death of his father, ostensibly killed by Fascists in 1936, before his birth. As he unravels a web of lies that seems to encompass the whole town, he finds himself entangled in the same web.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both mystery & drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLa Dolce Vita (1960)
Episodic journey of journalist Marcello who struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Conformist (1971)
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLa Commare Secca (1962)
Roman police detectives interrogate a series of potential perpetrators in their struggle to determine whom to arrest for the brutal murder of a beautiful prostitute whose body is discovered in a park on the day of a torrential rainstorm. One by one, the prime suspects -- girl-crazy teenager Nino, pickpocket Canticchia, a soldier on leave, a tourist and a pimp -- recount the events of the day to the police, each insisting he is innocent.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both mystery & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFrom the Clouds to the Resistance (1979)
Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese’s «Dialoghi con Leucò», taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese’s novel «La luna e i falò»: after World War II the emigrant «The Bastard» comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find out that everyone he knew has died, and that the war has deeply changed relationships between people.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Oedipus Rex (1967)
In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Oedipus, and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Oedipus that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road…
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this8½ (1963)
Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisConversation Piece (1974)
A retired professor of American origin lives a solitary life in a luxurious palazzo in Rome. He is confronted by a vulgar Italian marchesa and her lover, her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, and forced to rent to them an apartment on the upper floor of his palazzo. From this point on his quiet routine is turned into chaos by his tenants' machinations, and everybody's life takes an unexpected but inevitable turn.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBelle de Jour (1967)
Beautiful young housewife Séverine Serizy cannot reconcile her masochistic fantasies with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. When her lovestruck friend Henri mentions a secretive high-class brothel run by Madame Anais, Séverine begins to work there during the day under the name Belle de Jour. But when one of her clients grows possessive, she must try to go back to her normal life.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMan, Woman and Beast (1977)
A small town in Italy is about to celebrate their patron saint. The city is full of people with different problems. A Communist in existentialist crisis that also must take care of his mentally ill wife. A woman who is tired of her husband's inability to show emotions and therefore more and more often slips into the world of dreams. A perverse butcher engaged in sex with the meat he sells when he's not peeping on young girls. A girl who became pregnant after having sex with her father. In this town a mysterious stranger show up and who turns on several of the inhabitants lives.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Fiancés (1963)
A young man has a renewed interest in his girlfriend when he takes a job that separates the two.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Leopard (1963)
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisI Vitelloni (1953)
Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. Fausto, the group's leader, is a womanizer; Riccardo craves fame; Alberto is a hopeless dreamer; Moraldo fantasizes about life in the city; and Leopoldo is an aspiring playwright. As Fausto chases a string of women, to the horror of his pregnant wife, the other four blunder their way from one uneventful experience to the next.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Decameron (1971)
A young Sicilian is swindled twice, but ends up rich; a man poses as a deaf-mute in a convent of curious nuns; a woman must hide her lover when her husband comes home early; a scoundrel fools a priest on his deathbed; three brothers take revenge on their sister's lover; a young girl sleeps on the roof to meet her boyfriend at night; a group of painters wait for inspiration; a crafty priest attempts to seduce his friend's wife; and two friends make a pact to find out what happens after death.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisL'Eclisse (1962)
Vittoria is a beautiful literary translator living in Rome. After splitting from her writer boyfriend, Riccardo, Vittoria meets Piero, a lively stockbroker, on the hectic floor of the Roman stock exchange. Though Vittoria and Piero begin a relationship, it is not one without difficulties, and their commitment to one another is tested during an eclipse.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Libertine (1968)
A sexy widow discovers her late husband had a secret apartment where he cheated on her. Now she decides to use the same apartment to explore her own sexuality.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Before the Revolution (1964)
As Fabrizio contemplates joining the Communist Party, he breaks off his planned marriage to a bourgeois woman and becomes incestuously involved with his alluring aunt.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisI Am Curious (Yellow) (1967)
Lena, aged twenty, wants to know all she can about life and reality. She collects information on everyone and everything, storing her findings in an enormous archive. She experiments with relationships, political activism, and meditation. Meanwhile, the actors, director and crew are shown in a humorous parallel plot about the making of the film and their reactions to the story and each other. Nudity, explicit sex, and controversial politics kept this film from being shown in the US while its seizure by Customs was appealed.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThe Passenger (1975)
David Locke is a world-weary American journalist who has been sent to cover a conflict in northern Africa, but he makes little progress with the story. When he discovers the body of a stranger who looks similar to him, Locke assumes the dead man's identity. However, he soon finds out that the man was an arms dealer, leading Locke into dangerous situations. Aided by a beautiful woman, Locke attempts to avoid both the police and criminals out to get him.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & mystery
Worth the HypeMovies like this
Like Theorem and something else?
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Theorem?
The closest matches to Theorem are Blow-Up, L'Avventura, Red Desert.
How are movies similar to Theorem chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Theorem, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.
Are there Italian movies like Theorem?
Yes: L'Avventura, Red Desert, The Damned.