Roman Polanski's Final Descent into Madness

Eumenides_0

Once I watched The Tenant and interpreted it as a horror movie. It uses many of the tropes of the genre: the sinister apartment, suspicious neighbors, apparitions, mysteries, hallucinations. The life of the hero, Trelkovsky, seemed surrounded by evil, secret forces trying to drive him mad.

Last time I watched it I challenged this initial interpretation. If this movie is a horror movie, it's only horror in the sense that a Kafka novel is horror. In fact this movie can be understood on a literal level as a lonely man slowly becoming crazy without any external influence.

Polanski made in his career three movies dealing with madness: Repulsion, which I don't particularly like because the development of madness in the heroine never convinced me; Rosemary's Baby, in which the heroine is driven mad by evil forces; and The Tenant, which might be the best study of paranoia ever made in cinema.

Trelkovsky is a young man who rents an apartment in which a woman killed herself. He becomes obsessed with her and slowly starts becoming her: he wears her clothes, puts on makeup, talks like her. But is he being possessed by a spirit, or is he just letting his wild imagination get the best of him? It's this hesitation between what is real and imaginary, and which Polanski never resolves, that makes this such a fascinating movie. Many events in the movie can be attributed to the supernatural as easily as they can be to normal causes, and it's up to the viewer to decide what to believe in.

Although this is not my favorite Polanski movie, it is nevertheless a good example of his ability to create suspense and portray madness in very convincing terms. And technically speaking, it's a marvel too. Suffice to say he collaborates with film composer Philippe Sarde and legendary director of photography Sven Nykvist (Bergman's DP) in the making of this movie. A slow pacing and sometimes uninteresting segments may make this movie difficult to enjoy, but it's an experience nevertheless.

score 7/10

Eumenides_0 14 February 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2207326/