Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) is a great film. I haven't seen a large enough fraction of the man's oeuvre to declare it his finest film (Stephen would know!), but it is certainly finer that the best films of many other directors. I might suggest that this film is best classified as a "psychological thriller," but if one instead adheres to the common practice of placing it in the "horror film" genre, it ranks, in my view, with very best of them: films like Psycho and The Exorcist. This is one of those special exceptions that rise out of the wasteland occupied by the majority of horror films into the lofty stratosphere of film classics.

Historical Background: When Roman Polánski set out to make Repulsion, in 1965, he already had one major life tragedy in his past and two more lurking in the shadows of his future. Polánski was born on August 18th, 1933 in Paris, France. His mother was a Roman Catholic and his father a Polish Jew. The family went by the name Leibling in France (Polánski was actually born Raimund Leibling). In 1937, his father made the disastrous decision to move the family to Poland, a return for the father to his native village. Consequently, all three were incarcerated in the Kraków Ghetto after the Nazi invasion. Polánski escaped from the ghetto and wandered the Polish countryside for much of the rest of the war, hiding with Catholic families. His mother was murdered in one of the concentration camps. The father survived the war and was reunited with Polánski afterwards.

Polánski developed his love of cinema while selling newspapers in Kraków, as the war was winding down. At age twelve, with the war over, Polánski settled into a course of study at a technical school and began acting in "kiddie-hour" radio shows. He started performing on stage when he was just fourteen and stayed with it for six years. In 1954, he was accepted into the Polish Film School at Lodz. During his five years as a student there he also worked as an actor in Polish films and directed documentary shorts, many of which can be viewed as "extras" on the DVD version of Polánski's first feature film, Knife in the Water (1962). Rarely had a director had a more auspicious debut film. It was the first postwar film made in Poland that dealt with a topic other than the war. Polánski received an Academy Award nomination for the film and the Critics' Prize at the Vienna Film Festival.

Polánski then returned to Paris for three years, where he made an episode of The Beautiful Swindlers (1964). From there, he was drawn to London by the swingin' sixties and made Repulsion (1965), his first English language film. Though Polánski was fluent in five languages, all of his films thereafter would be made in English. Repulsion was funded by Compton, which was in the exploitation movie business, but wanted something artsy to elevate their image. Polánski would become known for his technical virtuosity, his fascination with the deep recesses of the human mind, and an emphasis on the themes of alienation and violence. Obviously, he had his own childhood to draw on for his understanding of the dark qualities of human nature, but he was also influenced by his experience with the likes of Ionesco, Pinter, Kafka, and Buñuel. One can readily observe in Polánski's films Ionesco's taste for the absurd, Pinter's preoccupation with interpersonal tensions and power struggles, Kafka's irrational, dreamlike-quality, and Buñuel's playful surrealism.

Still in his future lay two more tragic occurrences. There was the brutal slaying of Polánski's wife, Sharon Tate, whom he had met and married in London in 1968. The couple had responded to the lure of Hollywood, where Polánski had triumphed with the classic psychological thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968). Charles Manson and his cult followers killed Sharon and four others on August 9th 1969, while she was eight months pregnant. Tate was stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen before being sliced open. When Polánski later returned to Hollywood in 1977, he precipitated his third life's tragedy himself, by having sex with a thirteen-year-old aspiring actress during a bathing suit photo shoot in Jack Nicholson's vacant home. Polánski was arrested and later fled the country and has not set foot in America since. When he later won an Oscar for The Pianist (2002), he obviously could not appear to receive the statue.

The Story: Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) is a beautiful but extremely shy young Belgium woman who shares a flat in London with her more carnal and liberated older sister, Hélène (Yvonne Furneaux). Carol works as a manicurist at an upscale salon catering mostly to overweight, middle-aged women. Carol, we gradually discover, is a mentally unstable young person. She's depressed and withdrawn, steadfastly resisting the advances of an earnest young suitor, Colin (John Fraser). She sometimes even lapses into episodes of catatonia, during work or when confronted with unpleasant objects. Carol is repulsed by almost anything having to do with men, sexuality, or the appetites in general. She finds herself unable to eat her fish and chips lunch, for example. At home, she is disgusted by the toiletries of her sister's married lover, Michael (Ian Hendry), left in their bathroom, and especially by the sounds of her sister's lovemaking ecstasy, heard through the thin wall of the adjoining rooms.

Carol's frazzled mental fabric begins to fully unravel when her sister goes off on an extended holiday to Italy, with her lover. She begins to experience increasing paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations. Cracks seem to form spontaneously in the walls of the flat and the rooms take on distorted dimensions. At night, she has delusions of being raped and defiled. It doesn't help that crank phone calls stir up her anxieties. Carol misses three days of work (without calling in) and when she does finally return, she badly cuts a client's finger during one of her catatonic episodes.

Carol is so beautiful that men are drawn to her despite her eccentricities. Colin, for one, is beside himself with desire for her and his frustrations mount after she stands him up for a date and then will not answer the door or the phone. In his rage, he breaks down her apartment door, and then tries to penetrate her psychological defenses. He makes a final mistake of telling her, with his back turned, "I want to be with you all the time." She obliges by smashing him over the head with a candlestick, repeatedly, until his last death quivers subside. (Be careful what you ask for, boys!) She drops his limp body in the tub full of water she had previously drawn for herself. A gulp of blood emanates from his mouth as he sinks to the bottom. With the door to the flat broken in, Carol has to barricade it to keep it shut.

Carol has delusions of hands emanating from the walls of the hallways in her flat, grabbing and groping at her. Later, the landlord shows up, demanding the overdue rent. Fortunately, Hélène has left it and Carol is able to hand it over. Carol is dressed only in a nightgown and the landlord's attention begins to shift from money to that other male preoccupation. After grousing about how the flat looks like a pigsty (which it does) and offering the obviously distressed Carol a glass of water, he suggests that they could forget about the rent money if she'd take care of him. "No need to be lonely," he offers. When he tries to force himself on her, she ends up slashing him to death with Michael's straight razor. (That'll teach the old lecher not to be such a cut-up!) She hides his corpse beneath a tipped-over couch. When Hélène and Michael return from Italy, they find somewhat more of a mess to clean up than the typical dirty dishes on the counter.

Themes: Polánski's theme, arguably his lifelong theme, was the murderous angry impulses of the subconscious mind. Polánski had learned firsthand what demons reside there, however alien they might seem beside the more gentile and humane impulses of polite society. Those demons emerge, not necessarily at midnight, but in war and mental illness (which are really the same thing on two different scales). The exact nature of Carol's mental problem is not explicitly specified, but the antecedents seem nevertheless obvious. She exhibits clear evidence of both positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, catatonia, grossly disorganized behavior) and negative symptoms (apathy, social isolation) of schizophrenia. She meets four of the five symptom criteria for the disorder (only two are required) as well as the duration criterion. She also manifests paranoia. Schizophrenia has a primarily biological basis but can be exacerbated by life traumas. There are suggestions, in the film, that Carol's father sexually abused by her in childhood. The evidence includes her distance from the family and fierce stare at her father in the family photograph, her revulsion at everything male (shaving equipment, etc.) and anything having to do with procreation (e.g., rabbits, known for breeding proclivities), and her sexual repression. Sexual repression is not an inherent aspect of schizophrenia, so there's likely some co-morbidity at work: schizophrenia compounded by sexual abuse as a child.

Production Values: The script for Repulsion was written by Polánski together with Gerard Brach, a scriptwriter that Polánski had met in Paris and with whom he would team repeatedly throughout his career. Although not an adaptation per se, the screenplay apparently drew several of its central ideas from The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. For a superlative discussion of those relationships, I highly recommend Mangiotto's Review of Repulsion, here at Epinions. Polánski, the Pole, and Brach, a Frenchman, as outsiders in London, spared no opportunity for caricaturing the Englishness of the men in this film.

Between the script and the direction, Polánski was in complete mastery of this film's structure. There is very little dialog in the film and what dialog does occur mostly has to do with ordinary life. The story's progression is therefore based almost entirely on a slow accumulation of small expository events. Exposition by accretion of detail is a technique that very few directors ever master, but which forms part of the core of Polánski's virtuosity. Not only is it effective storytelling, but it also puts the viewer in the position of observing the shocking events juxtaposed against banalities of every day life. During one of the rape delusions experienced by Carol, we hear the incessant ticking of a large clock in the background. When horror is grounded in reality in that manner, it is all the more effective in eliciting viewer response.

I can't begin to cite all of the little devices by which Polánski and Deneuve establish Carol's tenuous mental condition, but here's a sample. Carol stops to stare at a crack in a sidewalk, apparently feeling its symbolic resemblance to her own mental fragmentation. After being kissed by Colin for the first time (fully consensual, in this instance), Carol rushes home to rinse out her mouth and brush her teeth. Spying Michael's toiletries on the bathroom shelf, she throws them away. She has to be told to "Stop dreaming" when she lapses into catatonia at work. Even a casual scratch of her nose, while she's walking, reveals a bit of Carol's detachment from her surroundings. Later, we discover that she's decapitated the roasted rabbit and put its head in her purse. The sprouting of tendrils on the potatoes underscores the general disarray in the flat. The lusty Hélène is also developed in this way, though less thoroughly. We see Hélène watching pro-wrestling on the television. We hear her passionate orgasm from a neighboring room. Later, she sends Carol a postcard with a very phallic Tower of Pisa and the painfully inappropriate admonition, "Don't make too much La Dolce Vita while we're away." That's also a cute film reference because Yvonne Furneaux, who plays Hélène, had a significant role in La Dolce Vita. We also learn that Hélène is in denial about the extent of her sister's psychopathology.

Nobody depicts the dark recesses of the subconscious mind better than Polánski (except possibly Buñuel). Polánski allows no obvious demarcation between reality, on the one side, and delusions, fantasies, and hallucinations, on the other. This is the truth of how life is experienced subjectively by psychotic individuals. Schizophrenics usually can't tell the difference between what's real in their lives and their delusions. Very few films about madness have mastered that concept, but two other ones that did are Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and A Beautiful Mind (2001). Polánski uses recurrent images of eyes (as the window to the mind, perhaps) and then completes the film's psychological underpinnings by ending on a close-up of Carol's eyes, as a little girl in a family photograph, standing off by herself but staring viciously at her father, behind his back. This film is jam-packed with little symbolic references and associations that give it endless layers for analysis. There's the bath, for example, that represents ritual cleansing after Carol's first rape delusion, but which ends up being fouled by Colin's corpse. On the other hand, Polánski incorporated precious few of the standard conventions of horror films, giving his thriller a freshness and originality that help make it unforgettable.

A lot of the frightening effect of this film is inherent in the cinematography of Gilbert Taylor, who cleverly depicts the delusions, hallucinations, claustrophobia, paranoia, and obsessions of the protagonist, through images. As Carol's condition deteriorates, the rooms of the flat are photographed through some kind of special lens that adds depth, giving the spaces an elongated appearance. Then, of course, there's the sudden emergence of cracks and the phantom arms that burst through the walls, grabbing at our heroine. The walls are "closing in" around her. Taylor uses lots of skewed shots and unusual angles to emphasize Carol's mental imbalance. Extreme close-ups reveal her sense of detachment and withdrawal. The entire film is shot from a subjective viewpoint, except for a short segment at the very end. We are placed in Carol's head and left to fidget and squirm there for most of the film's duration. The cinematography is a frosty high-contrast black-and-white, well rendered on the digitally remastered DVD from Royal Films International. The rhythm and tension of the film are nicely maintained by slow fades to black between scenes. Just as Antonioni invented a new visual language with L’Avventura (1960), Polánski worked out a new cinematic language for expressing insanity.

Polánski had a great gift for using ambient sound effects to develop tension. There are long segments of the film that are silent except for the sounds of Carol moving about the flat. Or the tick of a clock, a tap dripping, or the phone ringing, ominously. At one moment of elevated tension, a little ethnic trio of musicians walks past on the street outside. From time to time, there's a musical score, but not the kind of overblown tension-evoking music that clutters up films like Peeping Tom.

This may very well be Catherine Deneuve's greatest performance. It was utterly remarkable that Polánski took a young twenty-one year-old actress who was the epitome of wholesome goodness, and turned her into a poster child of homicidal maniacs. How much of the credit belongs to Polánski and how much to Deneuve is something we'll never know, but there's enough to go around. Deneuve, in 1965, was angelic and one of the most ravishingly beautiful actresses the world had ever seen. That exterior beauty sets up a magnificent contrast with her character's mental derangement and murderous rampage. There's also a nice contrast established between Deneuve and her lusty sister. The marvel of Deneuve's performance is how thoroughly understated it is. By holding back, she establishes the withdrawn, timid quality of her character and her sexual repression. Never has a blank, expressionless face been either more gorgeous or more revealing. Deneuve was an intelligent woman and a lot more substantial in build than the typical horror film ingénue. In her long career, Deneuve would appear in such films as in such films as Umbrellas of Cherbourg(1964), Belle de Jour (1967), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Tristana (1971), Indochine (1992), and Dancer in the Dark (2000).

Polánski sometimes badgered his star performer mercilessly. When he was having difficulty getting enough of an expression of violent anger out of her for the first murder scene, he berated her viciously (with the camera rolling) until she exploded in anger. He then handed her the candlestick and ducked quickly! That swing of the candlestick is what you actually see in the film – with Polánski, not Colin, as the intended target!

Deneuve got able supporting performances from Yvonne Furneaux, Ian Hendry, John Fraser, and Patrick Wymark. Furneaux's other work included parts in The Mummy (1959) and La Dolce Vita (1960). Hendry went on to appearances in Get Carter (1971), Theater of Blood (1973), and The Passenger (1975). Fraser had previously appeared in Waltz of the Toreadors (1962). Wymark later worked in Where Eagles Dare (1969).

Bottom-Line: If you purchase this film on DVD, be sure to buy one that has been digitally remastered. An older DVD, using a straight transfer from VHS, is less desirable. If you live in a Region 2 country or have Region 2 playback capability, you can get an excellent DVD version from the U.K. that is packed with extras, including an auditory commentary featuring Polanski and Denueve, an audio interview with Professor K. Gregory, a trailer, two animated galleries, and cast and crew biographies. My Region 1 DVD had no extras.

The best review of this film on the Internet – the definitive review – is right here at Epinions: Mangiotto's Review of Repulsion. I highly recommend it, especially for those interested in the literary influences behind the script for Repulsion. I also highly recommend this wonderful film, Repulsion. It won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival but has fared even better with time, having won the enthusiastic admiration of millions of film lovers.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age