Horrorfest 2014: The Tenant

I've heard a lot about Roman Polanski's 1976 flick THE TENANT as part of his apartment trilogy which is also made up of the great ROSEMARY'S BABY, which I saw before I started doing Horrorfest, and the awesome REPULSION, which was covered in a previous Horrorfest. Because of this, I figured THE TENANT would be another classic, so I was surprised to find that it wasn't that great.

It starts out promisingly enough as Polanski himself stars as the titular tenant, who rents the apartment of a girl who has thrown herself out the window (Simone Choule). After being shown around by a weird concierge (Shelley Winters) and a brief interview with a cranky landlord (Melvyn Douglas), Polanski visits the comatose former tenant of his place and ends up on an awkward date with her grieving friend (Isabelle Adjani).

Early on it becomes clear that if Polanski makes the slightest move in his apartment his neighbors start banging on the walls. When he has friends over for a house warming party, he gets neighbors knocking on his door and complaining. It's not a pleasant situation.

This is the kind of flick where the overwhelming sense of existential dread and paranoia is supposed to be the source of the horror, but unlike the similarly psychologically driven REPULSION, here it just does not work. I'm not really sure why. Polanski finds weird stuff around his apartment, has weird interactions with the neighbors, thinks the bathroom might be haunted, has people staring at him through the windows all the time, and it ultimately doesn't add up. It gets kinda ridiculous, sure, but doesn't really add up.

There might be something to be said for a movie in which a nebbish, well behaved, normal dude moves into a place and starts to question his own sanity when all of his neighbors insist he's annoying and bothering everyone when he doesn't feel like he is. If everyone was banging on your walls and giving you dirty looks and deep down you wanted to do the right thing by them, you might start to wonder if you really did do something wrong. But this isn't quite the direction the movie takes. I'm not really sure which direction it does take, actually, and that's not helped by the "surprise" ending.