Beystiman
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
Bessie Smyth
Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.
Ezmae Chang
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Leofwine_draca
THE TENANT comes as a dark and spellbinding surprise for a viewer who previously encountered Roman Polanski's REPULSION and found it somewhat overrated. THE TENANT has a similar feel, setting, and unnerving atmosphere to it, but it turns out to be much closer to the kind of film that I love to watch. It's a slow-burning suspense story all about the atmosphere and psychology of the situation, the kind of tale where you're never quite sure whether the protagonist is going mad or if there is indeed a conspiracy plot against him. Polanski does some very strong work here, both as director and as the everyman protagonist, playing an essential cypher for the viewer. There are some stark and violent moments but this is mainly about an evocation of unease, of the mildly sinister, and I found it worked a treat.
SnoopyStyle
Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski) is a meek bureaucrat in Paris. He rents an apartment whose previous tenant Egyptologist Simone Choule jumped out the window. She goes to the hospital to find Stella (Isabelle Adjani) with her friend Simone completely bandaged. His neighbor complains about his noisy party. There are strange things happening and he's getting paranoid about the other people in the building.There is a nice sense of impending doom. The whole movie is a series of slightly off situations. It feels Kafkaesque. Roman Polanski is not a good enough actor to bring out that intense paranoia or that disturbed frustration. The movie does ramble around and it needs a more compelling lead to take charge. It goes off in some maddening avenues. I actually don't like the dueling point of views between the real world and his perception. It would be better to stay only with his surreal visions until the final scenes.
sandnair87
'The Tenant' is the final film in Roman Polanski's unofficial trilogy of films about apartment dwellers gradually succumbing to their paranoia. Like Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, it is about the protagonist's own perception of what's being "done to him" and exists only in the darkest recesses of his own mind.It tells the story of the strange series of occupations that take place when Mr. Trelkovsky (a fabulously understated Polanski himself), a filing clerk in a library, moves into a two-room Paris apartment made vacant by the attempted suicide of the previous tenant. Small boned and physically vulnerable, he seems to be aware of having put off people all his life. Thus he goes to great lengths to avoid offending his neighbors.Little by little, Trelkovsky comes to suspect that the other tenants in the building have somehow been responsible for the earlier tenant's suicide attempt. He suffers persecution from apparently everyone in sight. The concierge and his landlord monitor his arrivals and departures. A housewarming party for his bullying colleagues excites complaints about his alleged boisterousness. He nearly lands a gorgeous girl but shrinks away when he suspects she's in on the conspiracy. A mysterious woman appears at his door with her crippled daughter to report that there's a conspiracy afoot to have her kicked out of the building. A busybody turns against him when he refuses to sign a petition to evict the woman but this lone heroic stand means that when the persecuted woman takes a dump on every other tenant's doormat, he has to scoop up some excrement and put it outside his own flat so he won't be blamed. But he answers all the unaccountable rudeness with infinite patience. One morning when he wakes up in full drag, missing the tooth that the dead girl was missing, he is finally convinced that his tenants are engaged in a conspiracy to drive him to suicide by forcing him to take on the personality of the dead woman. All this leads to a scandalous double climax that is still among the most despairing in cinema.'The Tenant' works so well is because it isn't so much a psychological portrait of grief as it is an unnerving acknowledgement of the ambiguous nature of the world. It displays Polanski's clear-eyed narrative discipline, with a creepiness that seeps right into your bones and never lets up. His nightmare vision of the apartment building as an almost living and completely malevolent entity remains unmatched by anyone in its astonishing hallucinatory horrors. Via seemingly simple albeit absurd exchanges, with flashes of black humor, he brilliantly evokes an evil society's almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.The Tenant is a chilling exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that overwhelmingly solipsistic and ultimately alienating.
Jugu Abraham
I agree with Roger Ebert's comment totally on Roman Polanski's "The Tenant"/ "Le locataire" (1976) on re-viewing it a second time after a gap of 30 plus years: "It is not merely bad, it is an embarrassment."The film was predictable from the start. All the actors were good but wasted, especially Isabelle Adjani--with one memorable exception Rufus. His body language was a delight to observe closely. The Egyptological motifs on the restroom wall were a hoot. even if some users might have stared at it once or twice. And imagineafter falling off 5 floors in a botched suicide attempt, bleeding and hurt, clambering up 5 flights of stairs within minutes to repeat the feat!!
