Overview: Living at home with his mother, bachelor house painter Themroc (Michel Piccoli, Belle de Jour) leads a dull life. One day, after an unearned run-in with his boss, the usually docile Themroc rebels and dismantles his myopic world.

Made on a shoestring budget with no intelligible dialogue, Claude Faraldo’s cult taboo-busting satire about a French blue-collar worker-turned-urban caveman anarchically eviscerates mid-century labor and gender politics.

Never released on home video in the US, Themroc is both a savage commentary on the post-68 protest movement and a precursor to French extreme cinema, newly presented on Blu-ray from a 4K restoration.

Blu-ray Verdict: Themroc (Michel Piccoli) snaps under the endless repetition of daily routine, turns his apartment into a makeshift cave by smashing the wall out and starts banging his sister while his mom cries about it. What seems like an isolated incident of a severe mental break begins to spread to neighbors and soon everyone begins reverting to the state of animals in nature.

Claude Faraldo’s Themroc absurdist comedy about the breakdown of society is an interesting challenge to how we think about the existing social order. In crossing just about every line imaginable (including incest, murder and cannibalism) he implicitly contrasts how disturbing an existence without order is with the highly ordered, civilized society we exist in that represses many natural base urges. In doing so he highlights that the way we live now is perhaps also not entirely in synch with the animal humans have forgotten we are.

The editing that shows the maddening unnatural loop of Themroc’s daily routine is highly effective, cutting between coffee in the morning, the clock chiming, and the commute to work and scrambling the order until it’s all a meaningless blur. Piccoli’s performance as a modern cave man is primal, guttural, fierce and wild in a way that is entirely aligned with the completely absurd humor of the film.

He’s like a bizarre MGM monster. It’s very funny to hear him growl and throw an alarm clock from his nest through a neighbor’s window when it goes off in the. morning or to see him wander the subway tracks just yelling and howling at trains.

Themroc is a damn weird movie. It’s very funny but in an offbeat way that definitely won’t work for everyone and the lines it crosses will surely alienate a lot of viewers. But as a deconstruction of civilized society it’s solid. Sequences like a man in an office whose entire job seems to consist of sharpening pencils, breaking the tips, and sharpening again highlights the uselessness of office work.

The way people politely ignore Themroc as be sledgehammers out his wall and throws everything out is a hilarious comment on politeness and how far we tend to take it. It’s an interesting look at how we reconcile the repressed animal part of being human with the artificially acquired things that let us live in a community and how fragile the balance is.

The most disturbing observation is how vulnerable we are to herd behavior and how quickly and easily everyone follows a strong man and starts to emulate Themroc and follow him no matter how vile the things he does are (a point that resonates all the more in a world filled with rich far right wing idiots gaining political power while slack jawed morons applaud and worship them).

Bonus Features:
4K Restoration from the original negative by StudioCanal
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
Interview with critic and filmmaker David Thompson (2025)
Archival TV interview with actor Michel Piccoli and director Claude Faraldo (1973)
Interview with Manuela Lazic on Michel Piccoli (2025)
Gallery
Trailer
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Smith
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Alison Smith, author of French Cinema in the 1970s The echoes of May

Official Purchase Link