Repulsion

Year of Release:  1965
Director:  Roman Polanski
Screenplay:  Roman Polanski, Gérard Brach and David Stone, story by Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach
Starring:  Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Patrick Wymark, Yvonne Furneaux
Running Time:  105 minutes
Genre:  Horror, psychological thriller

Carol Ledoux (Deneuve) is a young Belgian woman living in London with her sister, Helen (Furenaux).  Carol is extremely withdrawn and detached, and has difficulty dealing with the people around her, however she does hold down a job as a beautician, and due to her looks, she has no shortage of male attention.  However, Carol finds men and their attentions repulsive.  One man in particular, Colin (Fraser), seems to have a growing obsession with Carol, although she does her best to ignore him and avoid him.  To make matters worse, Helen has a boyfriend, Michael (Hendry), who Carol deeply dislikes.  When Helen and Michael go on holiday to Italy, Carol is left alone in the flat, with the isolation causing an increasing strain on her already fragile sanity, as her reality lowly descends into a hallucinatory nightmare.

This was Roman Polanski's second feature film, following the acclaimed Knife in the Water (1962), and his first film in the English language, which he didn't speak at all well at the time.  This is a strange, disturbing film, detailing a woman's descent into madness.  The film starts off in relatively realistic territory, detailing Carol's day to day life at work and at home and the persistent harassment that she experiences on the street.  There really are no sympathetic male characters in the film, they are either boorish, stupid, unfaithful, bullying and mostly would-be abusers (which is kind of ironic considering that Polanski himself was convicted of sexual abuse thirteen years later).  Later on the film takes on a more surreal, expressionistic tone, with memorably nightmarish imagery, such as cracks appearing in the wall, hands reaching out from the wall to grab Carol, the flat seeming to grow and shrink, and dark figures glimpsed in mirrors.  There is also the rabbit that Helen is going to cook early in the film before abandoning it, and Carol leaves the plate of meat out to get increasingly rank.  Catherine Deneuve gives a memorable performance as the tormented Carol.  The film is very well made, and stylishly directed.  If it wasn't for Roman Polanski's crimes, this could be seen as quite a progressive film and, ironically,  in the age of "Me Too" and lockdown it is surprisingly relevant to today.  It certainly is a must-see.

  Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion