Repulsion 35mm

About

When her sister and her sleazy boyfriend leave repressed Belgian ex-pat manicurist Catherine Deneuve alone in their London apartment, strange things start to happen. Barricading herself indoors after an abusive phone call, she catches someone’s reflection in a mirrored door — then the walls tear open, grabbing hands reach through them, and flies gather in the wake of her would-be boyfriend and buttinsky landlord’s unwanted intrusions. Polanski’s first English-language picture is that rarity: a portrait of the growth of insanity from inside, sans longwinded Freudian explanations. Deneuve, straight from the slightly more cheerful Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is blood-curdlingly believable as the repelled-by-sex heroine, the projection of her nightmares onto the white walls of her lair a brilliant metaphor for cinema itself. With a subtly unsettling Chico Hamilton jazz score, stark black and white cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, Star Wars) and a wordless final shot guaranteed to haunt, Repulsion is widely considered a “masterpiece, with something repulsive for everyone."