The Tenant Directed by Roman Polanski France, 1976 Featuring Roman Polanski’s last major appearance in one of his own films, The Tenant completes the director’s look at paranoid city life, begun with 1965’s Repulsion. Polanski plays Trelkovsky, a shy man who becomes convinced that his neighbors are scheming to drive him to suicide. Like Rosemary’s …
Knife in the Water Directed by Roman Polanski Poland, 1962 Certainly a stretch to categorize as horror, Roman Polanski’s debut feature anticipates the creeping dread and tense blocking that will characterize his later, truer films of the genre. Husband and wife Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) pick up a young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) …
The first in Roman Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” (preceding Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant), Repulsion is a landmark psychological horror film, whose influence can be seen from Fat Girl to Black Swan.
The imagery of “Tess” is what strikes first and leaves the greatest impression, and it was undoubtedly with this in mind that Criterion pulled out all the stops with this release.
Repulsion (1965) Dir. Roman Polanski United Kingdom – 105 minutes, B&W Criterion Spine # 483 Warning: Here be spoilers. Like flies to the gooping carcass of a skinned rabbit, Repulsion invites a lot of intellectual psychobabbling that usually amounts to the same things being said by different people. We can all pretty much agree what …