Repulsion (1965)

Hands and hambones, sisters and solitude, cracking minds and cracking walls; these are the ingredients that make up Roman Polanski's Bunuelian chamber drama. The story of one woman's self-imposed isolation and her resulting decent into insanity is at once gripping and unsettling; we are never quite sure what to make of a particular action or event, at least at first, but it is almost as if we are the protagonist so there is no hope of letting go.

Young and aloof, Belgian Carol (the beautiful Catherine Deneuve) works at a beauty salon and lives with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) in mod sixties London. She is utterly uninterested in men and their constant advances and only seems comfortable in the presence of other women. When her sister leaves with her lover for a vacation in Italy, leaving Carol alone at her apartment, she starts to lose it a little bit, descending into the darkest recesses of her suppressed subconscious.

Like Polanski's other work in the genre, Repulsion is subtle in its horror, though though are some truly terrifying moments. Carol's madness is shocking, unique and wholly disturbing, as well as indecipherable from reality, and no one, not even our poor protagonist, knows what to make of it. The film is an examination of a kind of reverse xeno-phobia; a woman outside her homeland (and perhaps her sexuality) crumbling against the weight of adapting or accepting her adulthood. As Carol begins to inhabit her own world, eventually never leaving the apartment where she keeps a dead bunny her sister cooked as a surrogate for her presence, the viewer becomes the only other inhabitant (well there is one more, but lets not spoil things). Suffice to say, though it's not the most comfortable world in which to live, its one you wont regret visiting. A-

Other semi-related thoughts.

-Cannot rep Inland Empire enough; if you like either of these films check out the other.

-The hamboning is fucking fantastic

-Really cool mod Jazz score by Chico Hamilton