It’s never entirely clear what is occurring in Roman
Polanski’s uneven but arresting The Tenant, but it’s always clear why it’s happening. Polanski’s
interested in getting at us on a level beyond intellectualism; it’s a purely
emotional response built on inhabiting the mind of one person. Polanski plays
Trelkovsky a mild-manner, nervous clerk who takes up residence in an apartment where
strange things begin to take place. Whether these things are real or not
doesn’t really matter, what does is that Trelkovsky does. Like Polanski’s
Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, the film is about slowly unraveling the psyche
of its protagonist and making us feel his distress and paranoia. We inhabit his
headspace and we question along with him the peculiar behavior of his neighbors
and the odd circumstances under which the previous resident died. By blurring
fact and fiction Polanski heightens the story’s off-kilterness, and it slowly becomes impossible to tell what’s odd yet real and what’s
just pure insanity at work. The Tenant
takes the outward appearances of a thriller or mystery but it’s more of a
character study. Polanski turns the apartment into an outward representation of
Trelkovsky’s crumbling mind, utilizing the cramped space to make us feel
trapped in his palpable anxiety and psychosis.
Grade: B+
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