In an apartment at Kensington, London, live two sisters. Carol, the youngest, works as manicure at a cosmetic center. From the beginning she presents signs of possible mental disturbances. When the sister and her lover go on holidays, Carol begins to get more and more imprisoned in her own psychosis. The young Carol, in an entrancing performance by Catherine Deneuve, is menaced by his own beauty and lives a silent hatred for the male gender, from whom she is simultaneously attracted and repelled. This sexual repression takes enormous proportions when Carol is compelled to resist to the onslaughts of a young passionate and of a lust landlord, who tries to take advantage of her apparent vulnerability. Roman Polanski directs this film as a disturbing essay on the shaken mind of a human being in a destructive path. The journey for the waken nightmare of Carol is filmed by Polanski in a vertiginous manner, with a virtuous game of shadows that swallow bodies and hide terrible secrets. The movie is full of references to Carol's amputated sexuality, metaphors to the possible rape, whose origin and perpetrator are unknown and only suggested: the breaches on the walls, the hands that appear on the corridor to caress and corrupt her. One of the most well-known images is that of the rabbit, which was prepared for dinner but never cooked. The rabbit sits in the corner of the room throughout the film. As the film progresses the rabbit begins to rot while first maggots and then flies feed on the carcass. The deteriorating state of the rabbit parallels that of our protagonist. Repulsion is the first of Polanski's "apartment trilogy", the other two being Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant. Like in those movies, the horrors are not external threats, but rather the horrors that lie within the minds of the protagonists.
Review of Repulsion
