The Tenant (1976)
Dir: Roman Polanski
As one may expect from a Polanski film, this film verges into the surreal, so I write this review without having reached a clear conclusion. Having said that, it is a brilliant work of suspense that builds slowly so that the understated climaxes it reaches (understated by today's standards) are truly unnerving and terrifying.
The homages to Hitchcock are obvious, in particular to Rear Window and Psycho, not only in the physical sense (hence my choice of picture above to illustrate the similarity with Rear Window) but in dealing with the same themes - paranoia, claustrophobia and insanity.
The plot is fairly simple - about a man (played by Polanski himself) who moves into the apartment of a girl who attempted suicide. He slowly comes to believe that it were the other tenants who drove her to her death and who are now attempting to do the same to him. But is everything as it seems?
The main score is pretty generic (reminiscent of Poirot, actually), but it is the stabby, synchopated plucking of strings during the tensest periods that have you shifting in your seat. There is also the familar Polanski-ism of using an unnervingly beautiful female co-star, who accompanies other, bizarre and oppressive characters that seem to inhabit his twisted world.
The direction may seem patchy and out-moded to many more modern film-goers. The character development is often left to the audience to imagine and the 1970s style of scene transitions may leave some wondering what time lapses have recently occured.
But these effects can be positive. For someone unused to this style of film-making, the uncertainty lends itself to a more anguish filled and introverted witnessing of a man cirlcing the drain of his own horror. Go see it, just to appreciate an excellent example of 1970s psychological thriller, but it may leave you unable to think straight for a few hours.
