Review of Repulsion (1965) by Paula S — 10 Jan 2009

This is a beautiful and genuinely disturbing movie. It's also a very careful study of space and silence, where space is imbued with more significance than it's typically lent (to invade Carol's space in the film is the equivalent of rape.

.. Polanski's lengthy establishment of the contrasts between in/out, open/closed creates incredible anxiety in the viewer when these boundaries are played with). Furthermore, the imagery and the editing (particularly the sound) are startingly poetic; the motifs of rotting, of cracks in the walls, and of the clanging bells work like magic to suck the viewer into the horrifying universe of this movie.

Perhaps most troubling of all is that the audience only gets a hint as to the nature of Carol's disorder. Polanski took Hitchcock's clockwork suspense and added a layer of the fantastic to create a movie that's as surprising as it is intellectually provocative.