The real focus is on detailing how the callous treatment of Carol by practically everyone around her only further serves to denigrate her standing as a “real” person rather than just a desirable beauty.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 29, 2024

Led by Deneuve’s committed performance, Repulsion is an innovative, atmospheric and effective psychological horror, which is clever in a way it uses its entire low budget cinematic arsenal to induce one particular sense of apprehension and dread.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 2, 2024

... A subjective portrait of mental illness that has become almost a manual to describe psychological breakdowns, especially the dimension of trauma and female repression. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 29, 2024

Co-writer/director Roman Polanski's disturbing, tense, frightening horror-psychological thriller was about the mental deterioration into schizophrenia of beautiful, timid, vulnerable and paranoid young 18 year-old blonde manicurist Carol Ledoux

| Nov 3, 2023

Repulsion is often imitated, but never repeated, and few horror films have a similar walls-closing-in feeling that this one does. Deneuve also delivers a powerhouse performance, bearing the brunt of selling an incredible lean narrative of horror.

| Jun 27, 2023

Repulsion is the scariest if not actually the goriest Grand Guignol since Psycho.

| Jul 27, 2021

The rest of the film has that gurgling, soapy sound of muffed intentions going down the plug hole like bath water.

| Mar 31, 2020

Were we supposed to have found it entertaining? There's more horror latent in this notion of the movie audience than in the film itself.

| Feb 27, 2020

The purest exercise in homicidal mania yet made, and the most singleminded.

| Aug 14, 2019

Repulsion is far more shocking, in fact, than anything Hitchcock ever made, because it can produce in the spectator the added shock of self-recognition, the hallmark of a real artwork.

| Jun 27, 2019

How much one remains held by all this probably depends on how much one is interested by the case-book aspect of Carol's story, but at least there are ample visual compensations.

| Mar 16, 2015

The young Catherine Deneuve (she was 22 at the time of filming) gives a performance so unsettling and so precise, I can barely believe she grew into such a confident screen presence.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 21, 2014

Roman Polanski takes us on a deeply disturbing, hallucinatory trip into Catherine Deneuve's mental breakdown in this British psychological thriller,

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 6, 2013

Deneuve gives an astonishing, clinically accurate performance ...

| Jan 5, 2013

Deneuve, as the woman whose fear of sexual contact is at the base of her neurosis, has seldom been less like her icy self.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2013

A film that expertly shows without ever telling, even while the symbolism is a mite heavy handed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 3, 2013

There can't be many other films which so plausibly show an entire, warped world created from a single point of view.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 3, 2013

Polanski makes us psyche-cine intruders, able to come and go as we please. It is this that makes the film so unsettling and perversely enigmatic.

| Jan 3, 2013

It's been an inspiration ever since for films about claustrophobic hysteria, but not necessarily in a good way ...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 3, 2013

Filled with indelible images and punishing sound design, Repulsion casts a shadow over everything from Eraserhead to Black Swan, but there's nothing quite like the real thing.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 17, 2012