Repulsion (1965)

City apartments are a familiar setting for films. Interior spaces are important to people living in the city, as it enables them to close off the outside world and have space of their own. Interiors are furnished and designed to the tenants liking, and these spaces have the ability to define a person’s character. The objects, colours and patterns in the apartment are personal to the inhabitant and have their own pride of place.

In the films Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976), Polanski focuses on the interior spaces becoming places of terror and claustrophobia. Polanski explores the entrapments of space in the city and how these closed spaces can embody our psychological neuroses.

In Repulsion, the protagonist Carol is left alone in her sister’s apartment in London. Carol becomes reclusive and slave to her paranoid fears and repressed memories, and starts to hallucinate. We see signs of Carol’s mental distress through her physical embodiment of unease as she bites her nails, chews her hair, brushes away invisible flecks from clothing or furniture, eats almost nothing, and suffers from insomnia.

As Carol shuts herself off in her apartment, her senses are heightened to the physical constraints of the apartment, away from the noise of the street outside. We hear the tap dripping, the telephone ringing, the clock ticking, the flies buzzing, the church bell tolling, the lift moving up and down. This starts to create an unnerving setting that stirs Carol’s inner fears.

During the course of the film, the spatial proportions of the apartment change, turning a claustrophobic setting into a psychic space where Carol becomes increasingly unhinged and troubled. The walls of the apartment invade her body. Masculine hands protrude along corridors and fondle Carol’s breasts. The light that shines from the end of the corridor highlights the edges of the walls and the grotesque shapes of hands. This adds to the feeling that the walls are closing in on her, trying to attack her.

The walls start to perspire, and when Carol touches them, a clay-like imprint is left on the surface. Cracks appear in corners of the room; the walls rupture and separate. The cracks in the walls heighten Carol’s psychological trauma, creating more panic and terror. Carol’s own imagination is using the space to portray her growing madness, to a point where she becomes powerless and catatonic.

The Tenant does not project the supernatural, demonic qualities of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), or the hallucinatory horror of Repulsion, but it does portray a fragile, unstable character who becomes a victim of his claustrophobic surroundings.

In The Tenant, we never quite know what is going through the character Trelkowski’s mind as he moves into an apartment in France. The previous tenant committed suicide when she threw herself out of the apartment window.

All of the protagonists in Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy are exposed to their anxieties as they adapt to an environment they are unfamiliar with. In Repulsion, Carol is a young woman from Belgium, living in her sister’s apartment in London. Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby, is new to the neighbourhood, and becomes paranoid of her neighbours’ strange behaviour. In The Tenant, Trelkowski moves into an apartment which feels like it is still inhabited by the previous tenant.

Polanski seems to be interested in interrogating and investigating private space. In The Tenant, when Trelkowski is moving into the apartment, the space is still filled with the previous tenant’s belongings and he feels like he is intruding on someone else’s space. The presence of the last tenant starts to embody Trelkowski. He becomes reclusive and shies away from the outside world. He observes the street outside from behind his net curtains of his window. He dresses up in the previous tenant’s clothes, which are still hung up inside the wardrobe. At the film’s climax, he throws himself from the apartment window in the same way the last tenant had.

The apartment in The Tenant seems to possess organic, bodily qualities. The staircase is cavernous, caving in on Trelkowski almost like the internal vaults in Paul Wegener’s German Expressionist film, Der Golem (1920). Polanski distorts the image of the stairwell by taking the camera lens out of focus, creating a sense of dizziness and nausea. The peep-hole on the apartment door is like an eye watching, invading the tenant’s privacy. A tooth of the previous tenant is found hidden behind a clump of cotton wool in a hole in the wall that seems to fit perfectly. Some parts of the walls are exposed, layered with plaster, creating a rough and unpleasant surface.

The apartment becomes not just an invasion of private space, but an extended personal nightmare. Hands begin to invade Trelkowski’s apartment through the window, reaching out for Trelkowski like the hands tried to grab Carol in Repulsion.

Polanski’s films show how interior space can affect human behaviour, and how they can have a life of their own. The walls and corridors take on human form, the wardrobe is wearing clothes that should not still be there, and the walls have scribbles and marks made by previous tenants. It is as if the characters are unwelcome in their own apartment, and as they struggle to find their own identity, they have to battle against the identity of the apartment.