Repulsion (Philosophers at the Cinema)

In REPULSION, Roman Polanski’s first English-language feature, Catherine Deneuve plays a Belgian girl whose mind and emotions crack under the pressure of nightmares and fantasies when she’s left alone in a Kensington bedsit.

One of the most unsettling horror films ever made, with complex visual and aural textures that anticipate the films of David Lynch, evoking the subjective terrors of a mind off balance and the frightening alienation of urban isolation.

The Belgian girl’s breakdown culminates in murder. Polanski’s cold and troubling study of mental collapse features disjunctive sound (and dialogue!), a threatening, surreal accent of visual and spatial dislocation and an evocation of London ‘made strange’ through a stranger’s eyes.

Introduction and discussion led by Dr Tim Snelson