Repulsion

UK 1965, d Roman Polanski

The credits of Polanski's first British film evoke both Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou and Hitchcock's Vertigo, and it fully merits the comparison.

When first in London, Polanski observed the city's redness, dominated by phone and pillar-boxes and double-decker buses. Though in black and white, Repulsion made equally inspired use of his outsider's eye, turning nondescript Kensington streets into menacing De Chirico spaces and a standard-issue mansion flat into an Expressionist hellhole as Carol (Catherine Deneuve) finds her already latent misandry becoming full-blown paranoid schizophrenia.

Polanski had teamed up with Compton Films, Soho-based softcore sleaze merchants who thought that the talented Pole was just the man to help push them upmarket. He got round his then-shaky English by keeping dialogue to a minimum, justified by its French protagonist and her own linguistic and social unease.

But the visual vocabulary was streets ahead of anything else in British horror cinema, with its cracked pavements, clutching hands and unpleasantly glistening skinned rabbit evoking nameless fears of mental disintegration, rape and sexuality in general. British censor John Trevelyan was surprisingly lenient, passing it uncut after taking advice from psychologists who declared its study of mental breakdown to be wholly and uncannily convincing.