Review of Repulsion (1965) by Nate W — 03 Jul 2012

"Stop dreaming, Carole" implores one of Carole's coworkers at the salon where she polishes nails. I'm sure Carole would gladly stop dreaming if she only could, but in Roman Polanski's masterful psychological horror "Repulsion", Carole's nightmares are perpetual and, to her at least, indistinguishable from reality.

Catherine Deneuve gives an exemplary, highly mannered performance as Carole, a sexually repressed young woman living in her sister's apartment, where she hopes to shelter herself from that most horrifying of monsters: man. While her sister and her boyfriend are on vacation, Carole descends into madness, with increasingly ghastly results, as she hides all alone in that big flat which she fears cannot keep out those masculine arms that aim to rob her of her virginity. Her paranoia manifests itself in her mind as phantom arms and imagined rapists, and it manifests itself externally by her violent retaliation to any man who stumbles into her chamber of solitude. She, in fact, is the monster, and that idea is the fundamentally frightening one that gives the film its edge.

Being Polanski's first English-language film, he could have exploited it for verbose exposition, but he understands how effective the scarcity of dialogue can be. He cultivates tensions with a gripping sound design comprised of pervasive ambient noises; the ticking of a clock, the dripping of a faucet, the buzzing of flies on a cooked rabbit which has gone uneaten for days (also a pictorial symbol of Carole's decaying mind), and more. None of them are particularly frightening on their own, but Polanski combines them to remarkably unsettling effect as Carole gradually loses her grasp on reality. The camera work is amazing as well. Through the diverse employment of slow push-ins/pull-outs, wide/tight lenses, and inventive (often slightly askew) angles, Polanski and his cinematographer Gilbert Taylor achieve a level of visual greatness that rivals "Psycho" for its ability to put the viewer at unease.

With its themes of sexual torment eventually releasing themselves as destructive actions on others and on the self, "Repulsion" would make a terrific triple feature with Brian de Palma's "Carrie" and Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan", both of which owe a lot to Polanski's masterpiece.