After ‘Repulsion’ and ‘The Devil’s Seed’, the director completed his apartment trilogy with a Kafkaesque nightmare
The explosion of a avant-garde horror cinema, ambiguous and focused on the psychological field that has been growing since the 2010s has its roots in European cinema from the 60s and 70s that always ends up circling around a problematic but inevitable name: Roman Polanski. The director who exploded in the 1960s with several surreal short films now has the extravagant ‘The Palace’ on screens, which seems destined to be his swan song.
The Pole has become an indisputable reference since his iconic ‘Repulsion’ (1965), a subjective portrait of mental illness, has become almost a manual to describe psychological breakdowns, especially the dimension of trauma and female repression. Things only grew when William Castle took him to the United States to film the occult film ‘The Devil’s Seed’ (1968), probably one of the most influential in history, the consequences of which we continue to see in other films so recent. as ‘The First Prophecy’.
Completing a spiritual trilogy
However, in what is known as his “apartment trilogy”, there is a missing piece that is often considered minor, or directly forgotten, despite the fact that its mark is becoming more and more tangible in new genre productions. This is ‘The Chimerical Tenant’, which can be seen in rent streaming and it was the last project that Polanski carried out before beginning his European exile, becoming one of his least recognized works. A return to the same territory as the first, based on the 1964 novel of the same name by the satirical writer Roland Topor, also a Polish emigrant living in France.
Topor, who was part of the Paris Panic theater in the 1960s, along with Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky, surfed between surrealism and the horror of otherness, embodied here in a simple office worker named Trelkovsky, who rents an apartment in Paris which is only available because the previous tenant jumped out of the window, now a first very dark joke about the accessibility of housing in big cities which will soon also be valid for Madrid. While visiting the dying woman he meets Stella, a friend of the previous tenant with whom he will have an uncomfortable romantic relationship.
When Trelkovsky moves in, he begins to have friction with his strange neighbors, obsessed with silence, constantly banging on the walls and imitating a totalitarian regime in which tenants betray each other to enforce compliance with the strict anti-noise ordinance. Unable to have a moment of privacy in his new home, the young man he becomes increasingly paranoid, while he is the victim of derogatory comments regarding his Polish origins or lifestyle, and is even asked to sign a petition to kick other inhabitants out of the building.
hell is other people
The residential community is portrayed as a scaled reflection of a resentful and hypocritical society, where the individual is cornered by stigmas and prejudices, an acid look at the social consequences of the post-war period in a Europe about to be transformed by messages of revolution. generational. The consequence for the emigrant is that finds himself slowly adopting the personality of the previous tenantwith points in common between the character played by Polanski himself and Catherine Deneuve’s Carol, a foreigner who lives in another country.
Both are very subjective views set in large apartment blocks in which it seems that The walls are practically an allegory of the limits of the mind, as if upon entering between them there was a thin veil that separates the path to madness, without us being sure of what is real or what is imagination. Both Trelkovsky and the neighbor with a disabled daughter are foreigners who seem persecuted among the murmurs. It is no coincidence that Polanski repeats the phrase more than once “but I am a French citizen”which scratches at the subcutaneous xenophobia in the society of post-occupational France.
The gray surroundings create a truly more and more oppressive feeling of claustrophobia. Petty intrigues and inexplicable conspiracies between neighbors make ‘The chimerical tenant’ one of the first purely Kafkaesque horror films, although it has many parallels with the even more unknown ‘Vaxdockan‘ (1962) which set a tone for certain European thrillers such as ‘The corpse incinerator‘ (1969) that in the end followed the pattern created by Orson Welles in his canonical adaptation of the Austrian author, ‘The Trial’ (1962).
Kafkaesque and cinema
The Kafkaesque in a pure visual sense evokes the almost expressionist photography of those films, and in the transition to color it acquires an ocher tone, of raw darkness of Ingmar Bergman’s favorite cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, who also worked on the optics of ‘The Serpent’s Egg’ (1976), an almost sister film, which the Swede seems to want to replicate in his own way. It is not the only one from that year that seemed to take inspiration from Polanski, and in ‘The Other Mr. Klein‘There was political paranoia and doubles, although neither of them is as terrifying as this.
Because Polanski imagines moments of pure and simple horror cinema, and most of them have to do with the bathroom on the other side from the patio from where different characters watch him, staring at him for hours. A resource that becomes increasingly disturbing until from that bathroom he sees himself. But the moment where he becomes truly terrifying is when he sees a mummified figure removing its bandages to reveal the face of the late Dominique Poulange, the previous tenant.
Trelkovsky’s macabre visions become more suffocating as his identity seems to be absorbed., he believes that a neighbor is attacking him and is strangling himself, he speaks in a falsetto voice like a shoe and the tone oscillates between paranoid atmosphere to pathetic comedy, which in his moments with Isabelle Adjani take on the form of the most depressing film that Woody Allen could imagine. Perhaps this black humor can serve as a counterpoint to the murkier aspects of the story, but it does not make the tenant’s impressions any less horrifying.
Journey to chemically pure terror
There are many moments where the camera reveals reality versus the visions to make it clear that there is some type of supernatural influence, or that the conspiracy that exists really exists. Trelkovsky probably imagines being unable to feel included in society, with which the psychological terror is not so attentive to a reality, without the clear possibility that ‘The Devil’s Seed’ presents, but neither the clarity between hallucination and reality of ‘Repulsion’, with which it has almost parallel scenes, like that hand that enters through the window, like the one trying to open the door that Carol saw.
There are moments of fever dream that seem clear, like that water bottle on a chair that turns out to be painted, or the furniture in the room becoming furniture for giants. The sequence of the illuminated ball, which bounces out of the window and suddenly turns into a decapitated head, kicked like the ball up to the height of his window, leads to an even clearer vision, when he sees how Mrs. Gaderian and his daughter are tied up as if in a folk horror ritual. When the girl points at him while wearing a mask, the rules of his vision explode and pure absurdity comes into play.
Here he also takes into account that his fall into the spiral may have to do with his own conviction that others will never accept his difference or his desire for acceptance by his neighbors, but on the other hand his possession by Simone’s spirit seems a different kind of dread. He may have lost touch with himself so profoundly that he becomes a gay woman, rather than a straight man, but whether through possession or in response, there is an inevitable determinism to his journey.
Sinister symbolisms
For two long hours, Polanski scatters clues and symbolism designed to decipher Trelkovsky’s conflict. The windows, present from the opening credits to the final general look as if each floor were an amphitheater, are recurring figures that are the only point of light in the dark and evil atmosphere that accumulates. With The visions through the patio build the connection with the former tenant, until he becomes one with her when he jumps, precisely, out the window. There is an irony in the idea that behind the mirror where the character frequently looks at herself is Simone’s dress, behind the glass is hidden what she is going to become.
There is also a constant fixation with the tooth, which Polanski first finds in the wall, behind an imposing old cabinet, hidden in a hole, which supposedly belongs to Simone, since we saw her in the hospital with a pronounced gap in her teeth. When Trelkovsky wakes up and discovers that his tooth is also missing, he is overcome by the conviction that the woman is dominating him, or perhaps that is what the neighbors want him to think. The hieroglyphs, the bandages, the frozen statuesthe fact that Simone herself was quite interested in the subject of Egyptology is an open enigma.
Mummification as a belief in its supposed effectiveness in preserving the body for its new life after death has an abstract relationship with the reappearance of the woman in small details, from the chocolate in the cafeteria, the same brand of cigarettes as her, and the transformation that reinforces the idea of life beyond death, “conservation” through possession as an endless cycle which is confirmed in the final shot, which suggests a supernatural explanation, which is also not incoherent with his madness.
An incalculable legacy
There is no greater alienation than the loss of one’s own essence, as symbolized by the ending with Trelkovsky merging with Choule, it is symbolic castration, a possession in which she is the tenant of her body—changing the meaning of the inhabitant of the title—or a condemnation. eternal for which we find no guilt beyond accepting stay in the apartment, like there was a deal with the deviland perhaps that is why in the last moments he sees his neighbors as chilling demons and beings with viperous tongues and white eyes.
Adjani’s presence is irremediably related to ‘The Possession’ (1981), which also has a Kafkaesque touch, but the notion of an evil building, which drives those who inhabit it mad, connects with Stanley Kubrick’s vision of ‘The Shining’, and the premise of the tenant who becomes paranoid and loses control of his sanity, or finds himself surrounded by strange neighbors has been constantly appearing in films such as ‘Apartment Zero’ (1988), ‘Barton Fink’ (1991), ‘Fever’ (1999), ‘The Community’ (2000), ‘The Nightmare’ ( 2000) and even the most recent ‘1BR’ (2019) or the live action ‘Hell Is Other People’ (2019).
The idea of urban estrangement has almost become a subgenre that raises or lowers the levels of paranoia or surrealism depending on each author, but The trace of ‘The Chimerical Tenant’ can be followed even in the entire first arc of ‘Beau is afraid’ (2023). The director of ‘Huesera’ has cited her as an influence and you can even follow her capacity for confusion in the same apartment in the award-winning ‘The Father’ (2020), which could secretly be part of this set of nightmares of Roman Polanski’s urban identity.
