The Tenant

aka Le Locataire France 1976, d Roman Polanski

The most characteristically "Polanski" film of its decade, not only does The Tenant revisit and elaborate on perennial obsessions (paranoia, voyeurism, sexual ambiguity), but Polanski himself plays the title role and is rarely off the screen.

Shy office worker Trelkovsky moves into a flat vacated after its previous occupant's attempted suicide. Visiting her in hospital just before her death, he becomes obsessed by her final hours, exacerbated by leftover possessions (a dress, nail polish, even a tooth) and his increasing conviction that she was murdered by sinister neighbours. And when their whispering campaign against him starts, he's convinced that he's next.

So far so straightforward, but in treatment The Tenant is anything but. As with Carol in Repulsion, Polanski locks his audience inside Trelkovsky's head, a metaphor recalling his musing about which body part would remain truly "him" if he were dismembered. But it's unclear whether the apparitions Trelkovsky sees are genuinely supernatural or evidence of increasing mental instability, an ambiguity maintained up to the final shot.

Despite a muted critical and disastrous commercial reception, time has been kind to The Tenant - even the jarring transatlantic dubbing of the supposedly Parisian supporting cast somehow exacerbates Trelkovsky's loneliness and isolation.