Defining Favourites: The Tenant (1976)

The closing chapter of Roman Polanski's "apartment trilogy" is more than just a claustrophobic nightmare as much as it is a confessional.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Gérard Brach, Roman Polanski, from the novel by Roland Topor
Produced by Andrew Braunsberg
Starring Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Claude Dauphin, Shelley Winters
Premiere Date: May 26, 1976
Running Time: 126 minutes

The Tenant is a film all about the feeling of being persecuted, but also what happens when the notion that someone will always be hunting you down follows you through most of your life. As the final film of Roman Polanski’s trilogy of horror films recognized as his “Apartment” trilogy, The Tenant may be the most claustrophobic of the bunch, but it’s also a film that speaks towards several traumas that have followed the troubled Polish auteur through most of his life leading into this point. Yet the distortion of perspective might be where the most terrifying aspects of The Tenant all come about, especially when much of this movie is built around the predicament of living your entire life in fear.

Like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby before it, The Tenant utilizes a very homely setting in order to make the horror feel like it could happen in a place that viewers can identify with something they know closely. For Roman Polanski’s Trelkovsky, this apartment is his own means of starting life anew, being any other completely unassuming immigrant moving in. But that becomes the perfect vice for Polanski to work out something more terrifying, because Trelkovsky presents himself as just a timid man who doesn’t speak much, which would already come off as strange to his neighbours – and thus he perceives them in that same manner too. So this would also be the perfect gateway for a more internalized horror at that, giving off the feeling it’s something that will always follow you no matter what.