FREE ON YOUTUBE Roman Polanski - Repulsion

Roman Polanski's psychological thriller is not only deeply disturbing and horrible, but also shows one of the rarest things possible in cinema: A woman commits all the murders! Catherine Deneuve's staring, her fearful gaze dominates the film. This look, we saw him shortly before in a certain shower scene and Polanski has not only copied a lot from this role model. Carol (Deneuve) is a shy, beautiful girl in London. She lives in a somewhat shabby apartment together with her worldly sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) in South Kensington. Carol feels disgusted by the disgusting (and married) boyfriend of her sister (Ian Hendry). He comes by for loud sex in the bedroom, right next to Carol and of course leaves his razor in her toothbrush cup. Carol is horrified by the desire of other men, even in front of her discreet admirer Colin (John Fraser), whose sincere love might be just right for her. Her fear of sex increases into a neurotic fascination for dust and dirt of every kind. The state escalates into claustrophobia and paranoia. The nightmare that Carol is preparing for himself is one of the most disturbing experiences I have ever had in cinema. How individual scenes dissolve into bizarre hallucinations that shake you up with fear... Who still remembers the "Assault" scene? The ticking enlarged clock? The cracks in the wall that Carol imagines when she turns on the light? When I saw Repulsion for the first time, it was the borderline experiences of fear that thoroughly unsettled me! I watched very few films that show a completely distorted world through a single point of view. In front of us a world of terror and compassion is revealed - Carol's world. This development is all the more tragic as Carol's beauty pretends to be "normal" and satisfied (after all, all men in the film demand their sexual attention). The first and last shots are close-ups of Carols right eye. A picture from her childhood proves that the rigid gaze, the madness, is already applied to her as a child. Is there an explanation for this? In 1968, Joseph Gelmis asked whether the children's photograph should suggest that Carol was a victim of sexual abuse? Polanski denied that. He only wanted to show that something was already wrong with the girl back then.