Word: polanski
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REPULSION. With monstrous art, Writer-Director Roman Polanski wrings a classic chiller from the pulse-quickening misdeeds of a lovely French manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) whose problems seem reminiscent of that classic chiller Psycho...
REPULSION. Poland's Writer-Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water) proves himself a master of menace in the case study of a fragile French psychopath (Catherine Deneuve) who works by day in a London beauty salon, spends her off-hours immersed in sexual fantasies and gruesome deeds...
Repulsion more than lives up to its title. It also affords grisly evidence that 32-year-old Polish Director Roman Polanski, who won fame with Knife in the Water, is no slash-in-the-pan wonder boy but an imaginative and perverse master of the dark art of menace. Polanski's first English-language film, Repulsion at first glance looks like a case study of a fragile psychopath. At second glance, or as often as a moviegoer can bear to peek through his knotted fingers, it is a Gothic horror story, a classic chiller of the Psycho school...
...crisis point is reached when the lovers leave for a holiday in Italy, abandoning the sexually repressed girl to her fantasies. And never has the inch-by-inch descent into total madness been more startlingly recreated on film. Slowly, Polanski assembles the fragments of a nightmare mosaic. A man's undershirt, a razor and a skinned rabbit on a platter become objects of dread. An oppressive silence is broken only by the buzzing of flies, dripping water, a ticking clock. Rooms change shape, the mere flip of a light switch creates fissures in the walls, a phantom ravisher begins...
...this simplified sexual interpretation of psychosis, no attempt is made to explain behavior except through the familiar device of a family portrait in which one sister stands aloof and stricken, while the other lies draped seductively over her father's knees. Writer-Director Polanski nonetheless makes his fair murderess seem authentically tragic, herself the most pitiable victim of the evil she does. Whether such a film finally serves any purpose other than to scare people silly remains doubtful, yet in the long tradition of cinematic shockers, Repulsion looms as a work of monstrous...