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.

Full Review | 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]

Full Review | 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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2023

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

Full Review | Jul 27, 2021

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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2020

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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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,

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

Deneuve gives an astonishing, clinically accurate performance ...

Full Review | 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.

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

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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2013

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

Full Review | 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.

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

A peerless Freudian nightmare, frequently revisited but seldom matched in its desire and terror, its visual-aural flow, and its queasy voyeuristic pleasure in seeing a frosty princess picking at her own skin

Full Review | Oct 29, 2012