As Polanski films go, this one ain't that great. Although The Tenant has a very original plot and Polanski did a great job acting in it, the movie is just simply not at par with some of Polanski's best for many reasons. After the first twenty minutes of the movie, it is easy to predict that Trelkovsky will eventually take on the identity of madame schule and try to kill himself, and given that the viewer knows that the movie ends in about an hour and a half, the viewer can also easily predict when Trelkovsky's going to jump. So what happens between the time the viewer figures out the ending and the actual end of the movie? Nothing much...at least, nothing so terribly fascinating that it makes the movie feel worthwhile to watch. Although there is dark humor in the movie, instead of coming across as something particularly creative and ingenious, the humor seems like sort of a cop out; perhaps it was hard to make the film frightening, so instead it was turned into a dark comedy. Yet, the humor in The Tenant was not particularly funny to me because it all seemed a bit cliched (except for the second to last scene). The voiceovers are terrible in the movie as well, and the score, although pleasantly pretty with plenty of nice clarinet obligatos, seemed as a whole, inappropriate. The Tenant isn't a terrible movie, it just doesn't hold a candle to some of Polanski's other films.
Review of The Tenant
