A somewhat enigmatic and ambiguously symbolic film by Pasolini. But it's meaning(s) seems obvious. First of all, that money do not promptly bring eternal happiness, you have to find your own meaning in life. The rich bourgoise family have money but no purposes, haunted by depression, and live utterly pathetic lives. The stranger, representing a kind of god, a prophet, a mad variable that bursts into bourgeois normality, irrational that upsets the rational, extraordinary that destroys the ordinary and every bourgeois convention. Terence Stamp is perfect in the role of the stranger who represents change, inner discovery and the awareness of the inner emptiness to be overcome. The bourgeois family, laid bare and by now alone with themself, will not be able to overcome the knowledge of their own nullity, it will implode without escape in a definitive explosion. Everyone falls into the void of a useless past, apart from the servant who accepts a destiny of holiness and manages to find a real role in the world.