Repulsion can be regarded as a psycho film and placed in the context of the Psycho (1960) cycle. But it is more like a post-Psycho psycho-thriller from the inside out. Rather than concern himself with thriller dramatics, Polanski takes a subjective jump into the disturbed person’s head to look out through their eyes. And Polanksi’s determination to dismiss as much baggage of the psycho-thriller genre as possible only intensifies the disturbing nature of the film – there’s no pat Freudian psychological explanation at the end as there is in Psycho. There are not even any explanations of Catherine Deneuve’s behaviour at all – all that one can piece together from various clues is that it has something to do with intense sexual repression. Dialogue is virtually eschewed altogether throughout. There are only a handful of exchanges, usually about something banal and offhand – indeed, many of the peripheral characters seem practically comic in the caricature of their Englishness. (The film was written by Polanski, a Polish Jew living in London for the first time, as well as a Frenchman, Gerard Brach, and their mutual foreignness adds something to the paranoia – the paranoia often seems as much one where the gap is a cultural-linguistic one as well as mental).

Most importantly, Repulsion is a film where Polanski disturbingly makes no distinction between where the real world leaves off and where hallucination begins. Watching the film, we are entirely sitting inside the mind of a mad person. A recurrent theme of Roman Polanski’s work, particularly his horror films, seems to be paranoia, of protagonists finding the familiar around them suddenly turned strange and obliquely sinister. Polanski’s evocation of paranoia is always intensely subjective, something he frequently suggests could just as easily be being imagined by his protagonists. He is aided greatly here by a fine performance from Catherine Deneuve who appears blank and withdrawn.

Polanski builds suspense unbearably with the accretion of detail in long, slow, silent fades. Sound effects are used particularly well throughout – there are long stretches with no dialogue, just the banal noises of Catherine Deneuve moving about the house. And then Polanski will suddenly explode into disturbing outbreaks of violence – the murders, or the jolt that comes when Deneuve shuts the closet door to see the man standing there – without any warning. The scenes where the cracks appear in the walls and hands start reaching through are startling. The rape is an extremely disturbing scene that stays with one long afterwards – the scene is shot in long, low distorted shots as the unknown assailant throws Catherine Deneuve on the bed, ripping her nightgown off, while the soundtrack stays unsettlingly silent but for the loud, measured ticking of a clock. The detached position one is forced into by the juxtapositions of the shocking and the surreally banal in the scene is extremely uncomfortable.

Roman Polanski’s other films of genre interest are:– the Hammer horror spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers/Dance of the Vampires (1967), the classic and highly influential Satanic impregnation film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the paranoid identity exchange drama The Tenant (1976) and the occult film The Ninth Gate (1999).