Repulsion · reception & legacy
1965 · Roman Polanski
How Repulsion has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A hit from the start — it won the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1965 and gave Polanski his English-language breakthrough — and it's only grown, now canonised as the first panel of his 'Apartment Trilogy' and a foundational text of psychological horror.
What's debated
The perennial fight is whether it's a genuinely empathetic portrait of a woman's unravelling or a male director's clinical gaze — folded into the larger, never-settled Letterboxd argument about rating Polanski at all.
Its footprint
The cracked walls and hands bursting from the corridor are among horror's most-referenced images, echoing through everything from Black Swan to countless 'descent into madness' films; 'Apartment Trilogy' itself became shorthand for urban-isolation horror.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' for horror and arthouse cinephiles alike — the standard first stop for anyone tracing psychological horror's family tree.