An intense psychological thriller from the master of the genre.
Repulsion (1965)
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Reviews Counted:44
Fresh:44
Rotten:0
Average Rating:8.8/10
Consensus: Roman Polanski's first English film follows a schizophrenic woman's descent into madness, and makes the audience feel as claustrophobic as the character.
Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Synopsis: REPULSION, starring the incomparable Catherine Deneuve, was director Roman Polanski's first movie filmed in English. It chronicles the descent into schizophrenia of a sexually confused, isolated... REPULSION, starring the incomparable Catherine Deneuve, was director Roman Polanski's first movie filmed in English. It chronicles the descent into schizophrenia of a sexually confused, isolated young woman named Carol who works at a beauty parlor and shares an apartment with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). One day Helen and her boyfriend, Michael (Ian Hendry), go off on vacation together and Carol is left alone in the empty apartment, where the only sounds are the constant ticking of a clock, faucets dripping, and the invasive ringing of a telephone. Extremely paranoid, Carol refuses to let anyone in and never leaves the building herself, in effect breaking off all contact with the outside world. In this claustrophobic environment, she begins to lose her grip on reality, suffering from hallucinations of being attacked by a phantom rapist and hands reaching out from the walls to grab her. Highly acclaimed and extremely gripping, Polanski's disturbing film can be seen as a prelude to his later work in the field of psychological horror: ROSEMARY'S BABY and, especially, THE TENANT. [More]
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, Yvonne Furneaux, Patrick Wymark
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, Yvonne Furneaux, Patrick Wymark, James Villiers, John Fraser, Renee Houston, Valerie Taylor
Director: Roman Polanski
Director: Roman Polanski
Producer: Gene Gutowski
Composer: Chico Hamilton
Reviews for Repulsion
Still perhaps Polanski's most perfectly realised film, a stunning portrait of the disintegration, mental and emotional, of a shy young Belgian girl (Deneuve) living in London.
If hell is in the details, Roman Polanski has captured it here in his disturbing portrait of falling into psychosis.
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 and approximately twice as persuasive.
Deneuve gives a scary and believable performance as a young woman who has never been completely integrated and who loses all sanity while we watch.
Prepare yourself to be demolished when you go to see it -- and go you must, because it's one of those films everybody will soon be buzzing about.
A story of sexual repression of such magnitude necessarily treads on Freudian ground but Polanski resists any urge to plumb the psychological depths of his tortured protagonist.
its ability to conjure monsters from its heroine's id remains unparalleled
Roman Polanski's1965 psychological thriller uncoils like a primordial poisonous snake disguised by unfathomable beauty that conceals its deadly feminine bite
This is an austere, scary, and timeless Grand Guignol work -- one with little dialogue.
Its two-way prism of audio-visual embellishments intuits a woman's fractured psyche and catches super-cool flashes of the audience's perverse cine-desires.
Repulsion is a frightening, fiercely entertaining experience that holds up to time.
Haunting and ominous from first frame to last, Polanski's first English film is a masterpiece, a subtle horror tale about the descent into madness of an isolated, sexually repressed woman, stunningly played by Catherine Deneuve who was only 22 at the time
Repulsion wastes no time before plunging its audience into the frighteningly disturbed mindset of its central character.
A contemporary audience might find the horror in Repulsion occurring too little, too late, but the fun of the movie is in the details, the careful etching of the mind of a woman cracking under the strain of her alienation.
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