Repulsion (1965)

Drama, Horror, Thriller /
7.6/10
91/100
95% – Critics
86% – Audience

Repulsion Storyline

In London, Belgian immigrant Carol Ledoux shares an apartment with her older sister Helen, and works as a manicurist at a beauty salon. Helen uses the word “sensitive” to describe Carol’s overall demeanor, which is almost like she walks around in a daze, rarely speaking up about anything. When she does speak up, it generally is about something against one of those few issues on which she obsesses, such as Helen’s boyfriend Michael’s invasion of her space at the apartment. That specific issue may be more about men in general than just Michael’s actions, as witnessed by Carol being agitated by hearing Helen and Michael’s lovemaking, and she not being able to rebuff the advances effectively of a male suitor, Colin, who is infatuated with her. One of those other obsessive issues is noticing cracks and always wanting to fix them. While Helen and Michael leave on a vacation to Pisa, Italy, Carol chooses largely to lock herself in the apartment, ditching work. There, she is almost hypnotized by her solitude, which leads to her mental state deteriorating as those obsessions come to the fore. She quickly descends into madness, which ultimately also affects those that are trying to get in touch with her.

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Repulsion Movie Reviews

Disturbing, Claustrophobic, Morbid

In London, Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) is a sexually repressed and schizophrenic young woman, living in a small apartment with her sister Héléne (Yvonne Fourneaux). Héléne has a lover and spends a couple of days travelling with him to Italy. Carole stays alone in the apartment, and becomes insane, having violent hallucinations of rape and murder.

“Repulsion” is a sick movie that has an outstanding performance of Catherine Deneuve, one of the most beautiful women in the world, in the beginning of her career. The direction and black and white cinematography are stunning for a low budget movie. The story is developed in slow pace, disturbing, claustrophobic, and morbid, and recommended for very specific audience. In the end, there is a hint regarding the reasons of the problems of Carole with her sexuality, when the camera comes closer to a picture of her family and she is looking fiercely to her father. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): ‘Repulsa ao Sexo’ (‘Repulse to Sex’)

Note: On 13 Oct 2020, I saw this film again.

a truly psychotic picture- one of Polanski’s best

Sometimes not saying anything in a horror movie, and letting a character lose his/her mind in a setting can really get the goosebumps going, more so than with the recent ‘shockers’ of late that all seem to take place within a haunted house or have some kind of ghostly secret. The most frightening thing about Repulsion, Roman Polanski’s first film in English (and filmed in England) is that everything that can terrify the audience is within the lead character’s mind. In this case, the young Catherine Deneuve plays Carole, a part-time manicurist who spends most of her time inside of her apartment she shares with her sister. Polanski piles on the atmosphere like fudge on a sundae- we literally get thrust inside of her mind as she goes into this down-ward spiral.

It would be one thing if the film was a great success just because of Polanski’s tricks with adding true fear into the audience, but Deneuve is a big factor in this too. It may be a triumph of under-acting, or even over-acting from a point of view. All through the movie she plays her paranoia and sexual frustration (if not repression) almost like a kind of doll, following orders we can’t quite understand. Sometimes she interacts or sees things that are strange (i.e. a cooked and eaten rabbit; the cracks in the walls springing up), but then as the film winds into its climax, she becomes perfected into this kind of traumatized, crazed creature. She is a beautiful person who plays a not too beautiful being, but she somehow pulls it off, even better than in her role in Belle du Jour. Bottom line, if you’re tired of getting disappointed with the latest horror films where unexplained phenomena in a house terrorize its main character(s), take a look at this film and see if it will leave you when you’re finished with it. A+

Engages the head but not the heart

Carol Ledoux is a young Belgian manicurist living in a flat in London with her older sister Helen and Helen’s boyfriend Michael. (I note that some reviewers have tried to alter the two women’s names to the more authentically Francophone “Carole” and “Helene”, but “Carol” and “Helen” are the spellings which we see in the credits and written down in the film itself). The film tells how Carol kills two men, a young admirer named Colin and Helen’s sexually predatory landlord. The title “Repulsion” refers to the repulsion Carol feels towards human sexuality, something shown by her reaction to the noise of Helen and Michael’s love-making, a reaction that is far closer to disgust than to embarrassment or annoyance. Carol is obviously mentally disturbed, something shown by her demeanour, walking around in a seemingly catatonic state and hardly ever speaking to anyone.

This was Roman Polanski’s first English-language film and his second feature film following the Polish-language “Knife in the Water” from 1962. It has generally enjoyed a high reputation among Polanski devotees, but it has never been a film which I have been able to warm to, even though, technically, it is a good one. It is a psychological horror film influenced by the work of Alfred Hitchcock, especially “Psycho”, and the use of black-and-white photography at a time when colour was becoming the norm may reflect this influence. (The use of a single-word title may also have been homage to Hitchcock; a lot of his films (“Saboteur”, “Suspicion”, “Notorious”, etc.) only have one word in the title. Polanski and his cinematographer Gilbert Taylor are able to create a powerful sense of isolation and claustrophobia and there is a particularly frightening dream sequence.

The problem with the film is that there is no character with whom the audience can identify or sympathise. In “Psycho”- a brilliant piece of film-making- Hitchcock is able to make us sympathise not only with his heroine, Marion Crane, and the other murder victims but also, to some extent, with their killer, Norman Bates, who is the victim of his own disturbed mind. Polanski is not able to pull off the same trick. Carol may be mentally ill, but that does not mean that the two killings can simply be seen as the acts of a deranged mind. Indeed, they might even be seen as justifiable homicide in self-defence.

This is particularly true of the landlord, whom Carol kills while he is trying to rape her. Colin may not be a rapist, but there is nevertheless something creepy about him. He becomes obsessed with Carol, whom he hardly knows, and when she rebuffs his advances he breaks into the flat to protest his adoration for her, obviously frightening her severely. We cannot therefore really sympathise with Carol’s victims, the one a would-be rapist, the other an obsessive creep.

So can we sympathise with Carol herself? We certainly could if we understood the cause of her psychological traumas, as we do with Norman Bates, but we don’t. It has been suggested that she may have been sexually abused as a child by her father or another male relative, but there is no direct mention of this in the film itself. The only piece of evidence comes in the very last shot of the film, which shows an old family photograph including Carol as a child, looking at an adult male with what has been described as a “look of loathing”. On the other hand, it might be a look of “Oh God, Daddy’s making me pose for one of these stupid family photos, and I just don’t want to!” Catherine Deneuve’s performance is, again, a technically good one, at least as far as Carol’s outward demeanour is concerned, but we never get much sense of her inner life- or even that she actually has an inner life. Carol seems so dead to the world that we never understand why Colin has fallen for her so heavily, even though Deneuve was of course strikingly attractive. “Repulsion” may be a film which engages the head, but it is never going to appeal to the heart. 5/10

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