Poll Position: Repulsion (1965)

Last week's poll was a product of Puneet's fascination with British films. I wasn't entirely sure where this particular list came from, but I was more than happy to put his list up as the poll. The winner was a film by Roman Polanski called Repulsion, which just barely beat out the original Wicker Man, much to the disappointment of my B.C. friends. So today I sat down with my host here in B.C. and watched this film result of Puneet's poll. Find my thoughts after the jump.


I have a hard time nailing down the story. As far as I can tell, it's about a woman, Carol, who is mentally disturbed or damaged in some way who relies entirely on her older sister to keep her focused and grounded on a day-to-day basis. The problem for her here is that her sister is now involved with a married man, and they plan on going away on a holiday together for a little less than 2 weeks. Carol begs her sister not to leave, but she pushes her sister further away at the same time because she also has an aversion towards men and hates the man she is having the affair with. Will she be able to cope with being on her own when she can barely keep it together even with the sister there? And if she can't, how bad will it get?

I'll be honest with you here, when Puneet first gave me this list of films, the one that sounded the most screwed up to me was this one. I was hoping it wasn't too disturbing as IMDB describes the film as "a sexually repressed young beauty goes insane with surreal fantasies of seduction and rape." What the hell kind of movie is this? I thought. Turns out I was about to find out when the majority of voters picked it over the others.

Cracks suddenly appearing in the walls were actually a really cool special effect

On the positive side, I was encouraged that it was by the same director who did Chinatown which I thought was pretty good, if a little weak in the ending. On the negative side, this was nothing like Chinatown at all.

I really found most of the movie to be slow, tedious, and boring. I can certainly see similarities between this and Chinatown in the pacing department, it just didn't work for me in this film. Probably the reason for that was the fact that I really didn't like any of the characters, especially the main character Carol, (Catherine Deneuve).

I wonder why she's holding a straight razor and is covered in blood? Hmm...

I found her to be quite annoying and foolish. She often just spaced out and lost all sense of time. As the film progressed this got more frequent and serious, clearly becoming a mental state issue rather than her just being airheaded, but she was just so clueless when it came to other people. At one point she turns on the bath, and then just zones out while looking for her shoe, only coming around once the bath is already full and overflowing. Then she starts just forgetting to go to work and starts doing things that she herself doesn't want to do. Her psychoses start becoming more and more extreme as the film goes on, and I suppose that is a little interesting, but to me they just seemed separate from her as a person.

While I'm sure it worked quite well in 1965, I felt these effects didn't hold up anymore.

The effects to visualize her insanity were hit and miss for me. She had this weird obsession with cracks in the wall and ground, and the more crazy she got, the more visible they would become, often ripping the walls apart in front of her eyes. Sometimes the small rooms of her apartment would also suddenly appear to be gigantic with all the regular furniture just spaced really far apart, and I loved how it made visible how distant" she seemed all the time. These effects were pretty cool. Later, she starts hallucinating that hands are coming out of the walls. While creepy, I didn't think the effect held up since it was so obviously fake, in that it was clearly apparent when and where a hand would pop out.

I really didn't enjoy the movie much at all. Sure the craziness was a little interesting, but that just isn't enough. A lack of a solid story, interesting characters, and dated, aging effects, and nothing special in terms of music, there just wasn't enough to grab a hold of for me. In the end, this is just a movie about a crazy woman, and she goes crazy. If that's something you want to witness, then by all means, check this out. If you're here and you're looking for my opinion, I'd say skip it. I think unless you're a film student of classic films, there's not really a point to see this movie.