In this post - “Scream” age, sophisticated viewers of horror films know that the promiscuous teenagers never make it to the end of the reel. But be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall not escape terror. Such is the premise of Roman Polanski’s 1965 suspense film “Repulsion,” which the Criterion Collection released on DVD and Blu-ray today.
The plot is fairly straightforward: the prim Carole (Catherine Deneuve) works as a manicurist in a salon. When her sister (Yvonne Furneaux) leaves their apartment for a vacation with her boyfriend (Ian Hendry), Carole quickly metamorphoses from skittish virgin to kooky shut-in to full-blown, hallucinating nutjob. While not as gory as your typical slasher film, “Repulsion” manages plenty of spooky surprises in its quest to plumb the depths of a very tortured soul.
The first 40 minutes are basically set-up and may try the patience of some viewers. But when he wants to scare us, Polanski goes for broke: the most spine-tingling moments are shot in a series of disjointed close-ups that leave in the dark as to what is really going on.
Anxiety is something of a specialty for Polanski. His first feature, “Knife in the Water,” documents the rivalry between two men uncertain of their social statuses, while “Rosemary’s Baby” has surely made more than a few pregnant women to feel ill at ease. With “Repulsion,” he uses all the cinematic tools at his disposal to ratchet up the tension. When not deploying the aforementioned close-ups, Polanski tends to keep the camera very high or very low, creating vertiginous angles that make the viewer feel just as off-kilter as the protagonist. In an effective — if not entirely original — conceit, Polanski has Carole’s external surroundings match her internal turmoil; that is to say, as she begins to fall apart, her apartment follows suit. Walls begin to crack, food rots, and a bathtub is used in a manner that would make your rubber duckie cringe. The sound also adds to the atmosphere; effects like the continual drip of a leaky faucet evokes those creepy feelings you get when you’re alone in an empty house.
Most of the film lies squarely on Deneuve’s shoulders; she appears in almost every scene. While a lesser actress might make the mistake of hamming it up and going for the whole loony toon, she exhibits a remarkable subtlety and restraint. One of the scariest things about madness is how well it can hide beyond an eerie stillness; it’s often the most freakishly serene people who can blow up at any time. Here, Deneuve employs a an almost catatonic tranquility; it makes her expressiveness in the moments of terror all the more potent. As an actress, Deneuve has built a career on her haughty sang froid. In “Repulsion” she retains that quality of cool, elusive impenetrability (pardon the pun); though the film begins and ends with an extreme close-up of her eye, we are never let in to her interior world. Nevertheless, she does show a different side here, one of extreme timidity and vulnerability. She spends a great deal of the film with one eye hidden beyond her bangs. It’s an interesting detail, as if she’s trying to shield herself from the outside world. But one can only read it as futile gesture, for if we learn anything at all from “Repulsion,” it’s that there is nothing more terrifying than one’s own mind.
The Criterion edition offers a new HD transfer; the Blu-ray boasts a compressed soundtrack. The extras are more limited than what we’ve come to expect from Criterion, but the two “making of” documentaries and commentary by Polanski and Deneuve should satisfy all but the most die-hard fans.
(Criterion Collection, Blu-ray DVD $39.95, NR)
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Anne Sachs says:
Don't forget "The Tenant," another of Polanski's anxiety-riddled films.