Repulsion

Repulsion
by Roman Polanski

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DVD details

Actor: Catherine Deneuve, Helen Fraser, Hugh Futcher, John Fraser, Yvonne Furneaux
Director: Roman Polanski
Brand: Koch International
Primary Contributor: Catherine Deneuve
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: NTSC
Running Time: 105 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-02-08
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAMS INC.

DVD Reviews of Repulsion

DVD Review: a shocking film
Summary: 3 Stars

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film

Repulsion is a film directed by Roman Polanski and is his first English language film. It is about two sisters from Belgium who are living together in a London apartment. While one goes on vaction, the other decends into schizophrenia and madness. The film is a psychological thriller and was given an X rating in the UK upon its release. It is indeed dusturbing and I recommend it not be shown to children.

Unlike the previous Roman Polanski film released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, Knife in the Water, it is possible to pause this film, and to scan the film forwards and backwards.

The DVD includes a 2003 documentary on the film's production, a 1964 French documentary about the film's production, Audio commentary from 1994 with Roman Polanski and actress Catherine Deneuve, and two theatrical trailers.

DVD Review: Gripping, Riveting, Frightening, Hypnotic!
Summary: 5 Stars

"Repulsion" is Roman Polanski's disturbing look at a woman (Catherine Deneuve) gradually going mad. Polanski takes us into the mind of Carol Ledoux, a French manicurist working in London. In the streets outside the beauty salon is a world where leering men send her into a panic. In bed each night, she waits, petrified, until her sister (Yvonne Furneaux) and her married lover come home to the apartment next door and engage in their their noisy nocturnal recreation.
When the lovers leave for a holiday in Italy, Carol descends into madness as her sexual repression triggers hallucinations that drive her to murder. Simple objects become dreaded portents, silence is broken by buzzing flies, dripping water, and a ticking clock. Soon, she imagines that someone is in the apartment to rape her. Polanski is adept at using the claustrophobic apartment as breeding ground for Carol's myriad escalating fears and visions. This is the kind of movie that makes you look over your shoulder and make sure the doors are locked.
Polanski would later go on to direct "The Tenant," a movie with a similar theme, and the hugely popular "Rosemary's Baby." "Repulsion" is an atypical horror film, since the terror is all in Carol's mind, and we are witnessing events through a frightened, paranoid woman's eyes. Ms. Deneuve is superb in a chilling role.
Bluray bonus extras include audio commentary featuring Polanski and Ms. Deneuve; the 2003 featurette "A British Horror Film," on the making of "Repulsion;" a 1964 French TV documentary filmed on the set of "Repulsion" showing Polanski and Deneuve at work; and original theatrical trailers. The new print is a high-definition digital transfer, approved by Polanski himself.

DVD Review: Newly Restored, director approved DVD
Summary: 4 Stars

For the viewers that didn't like this film, if they were expecting a film like Psycho, this is not that film. In any case, this film was quite effective at depicting, a character on the edge of sanity, who is schizophrenic, and has paranoid delusions, which leads to violence and psychosis. The films, visual elements carries the story through expressive camerawork and lighting, and only uses sparse dialogue, to tell Carol's story. A different approach to a similar theme of mental illness, was the film A Beautiful Mind, by Ron Howard, which also deals with schizophrenia, and paranoid delusions, but is presented in such a way so that the viewers can identify with what the central character is going through, although, it's hard to tell, what's reality or fiction, and what is just a form of storytelling for the screen.

DVD Review: Dark and stylish horror
Summary: 4 Stars

The Bottom Line:

Roman Polanski's impeccably shot horror film about a repressed women devolving into madness inside her apartment complex, Repulsion doesn't have the urgency that the director would bring to Rosemary's Baby three years later but it's a worthy film in its own right, delivering chills on a fairly regular basis and featuring a dementedly good performance by Denueve in the lead; if you like horror that doesn't involve a masked serial killer than pop this one into your DVD player of choice.

3/4

DVD Review: Just imagine...
Summary: 4 Stars

...being in the audience of a theater that was showing this for the first time back in the 1960s. The slow decay of the star is even unnerving in this day and age and I'm sure it was a shock back then. It was an enjoyable movie and was pretty disturbing, but thanks to all the desensitization of the modern age, it will probably lose some of its scarier parts due to the fact that it's just not "that scary" nowadays. The star really made it seem like to the viewer that you were truly watching someone unravel. The Criterion version has a nice crisp transfer in B&W and it is great! Recommended!!

Description of Repulsion

Left alone when her sister goes on vacation a sexually repressed young beauty goes insane with surreal fantasies of seduction and rape Studio: E1 Entertainment Release Date: 03/08/2005 Starring: Catherine Deneuve

Roman Polanski was still a newcomer to the world of cinema when he unleashed this unforgettable exercise in skin-crawling terror. Repulsion was the Polish director's first film in English, but that hardly mattered: much of the movie is as wordless (and as weird) as the silent Nosferatu. The young Catherine Deneuve plays a Belgian girl stranded in '60s London, a shy beauty with no social skills. When her sister leaves their shared flat, Deneuve goes gradually, quietly, completely mad. Her world becomes Polanski's paintbox, as the devilish director distorts reality via a series of surrealistic touches (grasping hands that protrude from elastic walls) and out-and-out murderous horror. Very few films cast the kind of eerie spell that this 1965 classic achieves, and it clearly points the way toward Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. As with most of the director's work, what is unsettling is not the overt violence, but the terrifying sense of emptiness and isolation, and the boiling unease inside one's own mind. --Robert Horton

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