Film Archive: Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)

Film Archive: a weekly essay on movies we love. This week, Roman Polanski's 1965 psychological horror film Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve.



The paucity of horror movies set in urban environments has always struck me as odd. Certainly I understand the fear inherent in isolation (The Shining is my favorite horror movie of all time, after all), and cities do present some storytelling challenges, most obviously the characters' easy access to help from the surrounding population. But there's a discomfort and unease that comes with city-dwelling, even for those who prefer it over the placidity of suburban and rural life. The strangeness, the diversity, the denseness, the crime and the poverty all create fertile ground for fear, yet these themes instead tend to manifest in more dramatic works like Taxi Driver, Do the Right Thing, City of God and so on - great films to be sure (Taxi Driver in particular does a good job of getting at the dark underbelly of big cities), but none tapping into the potential for basic, elemental terror.

Rare exceptions are found in Roman Polanski's so-called "apartment" trilogy: 1965's Repulsion, 1967's Rosemary's Baby, and 1976's The Tenant, all expertly made horror movies dealing with the alienation of urban life. Of the three, my personal favorite is Repulsion, for a number of reasons - Catherine Deneuve's detached and eerie performance, the increasingly disorienting black and white photography, the thematic importance of gender, the gradual introduction of the bizarre and surreal.

The film is set in London and does not immediately present itself as horror. We are introduced to Deneuve's Carol, a young and beautiful woman who is intensely uncomfortable with men and sex. We're never quite sure what's at the root of her repulsion: the apparent importance of a family photo in which Carol as a child stares vacantly at the camera suggests the possibility of some prior abuse, but we really don't know. In any event, when her sister goes on vacation with her boyfriend, Carol is left alone with her anxiety until it slowly morphs into madness.

What I love about Repulsion is the way it uses the daily sources of discomfort in our lives as a platform on which to build an escalating sense of horror. Being surrounded by strangers, living in close quarters with others, and the aggressive and occasionally sociopathic leanings of mainstream heterosexual male culture - these things are, for many of us, the source of a mild, manageable, but very real fear that we live with from day to day. Polanski simply turns up the dial on them until they become unnervingly disturbing.

Here's the trailer, but try to pay more attention to the images than the ridiculously melodramatic narrator: