[In Repulsion] the murderer is dewily sensitive Catherine Deneuve. But, instead of discovering her through the eyes of others, as in the best of the preceding films, Psycho, we live life with her, look out on the world through her eyes—with the additional advantage that we can understand the ordinary human reactions to which she is blind. It's an admirable compromise between a conventional and a 'stream-of-consciousness' film.
I won't dwell … on the film's 'sensational' qualities which are considerable. More important is the film's whole atmosphere, exemplified by the shot of the angelic young murderess-to-be walking, unseeing, past a road accident. Her quiet deterioration is integrated with our everyday—London's familiar streets (in the exteriors), the routine of everyday living (steadily degenerating in the flat), the myopic goodwill of her friends (in the beauty parlour). Everybody must have wondered how it would feel to go, slowly, mad; how your friends would react to the warning symptoms; but above all how the world would seem, how you'd gradually withdraw into a kind of isolation and timelessness in which, steadily, hideous dreams acquired greater reality than reality and devoured your mind until time, place, life itself broke up into an incoherent succession of extreme states. Of all the films I've seen on the topic of madness this gives the most vivid picture of being mad. It is vivid because no verbal explanations, no please for understanding, get in the way; we simply watch her feelings, and identify, and share. (pp. 28-9)
Raymond Durgnat, "Film Guide: 'Repulsion'," (© copyright Raymond Durgnat 1965; reprinted with permission), in Films and Filming, Vol. 11, No. 11, August, 1965, pp. 28-9.
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