["Cul-de-Sac"] is the quintessence of fashionable, phony movie-making, and I am all the more impatient with it because of my admiration for Mr. Polanski's "Knife in the Water."… [In "Knife in the Water"] the test, conducted mainly in terms of a weekend sail on a remote Polish lake, gave the director an opportunity to deal with some of the oldest and most imperious emotions we know—fear, lust, rage, and jealousy—which he depicted with insouciant conviction, as if, despite their humble origins in prehistory, they were still worth paying strict attention to. The most notable thing about Polanski's ["Repulsion"] … was a lessening of this conviction. Like Hitchcock, and perhaps in homage to him, Polanski shifted his attention from the emotions of his characters to the emotions of his audience; he was plainly out to shock us at any cost, and the cost proved high. The heroine of "Repulsion" was a pretty girl who skittered hysterically away from any promise of a sexual relation, but we never learned why, the significant action of the movie having taken place before the movie began. Polanski cavalierly pretended to provide a clue to her madness by ending the movie with a stop-shot of a faded family photograph, in which the girl stares woebegonely out at us, already a victim. But a victim of what? Of whom? The family photograph is no "Rosebud"—indeed, it compounds the cheat of the movie by affecting to explain everything and explaining nothing….
[In "Cul-de-Sac"] the lack of conviction is complete. A slick, gaudily Gothic movie, it seems bent on making our flesh creep, but not through the manipulation, however perverse, of any recognizable human emotion.
Brendan Gill, "Dead End," in The New Yorker (© 1966 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. XLII, No. 38, November 12, 1966, p. 115.
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