SOURCE: Crnkovic, Gordana. Review of Death and the Maiden, by Roman Polanski. Film Quarterly 50, no. 3 (spring 1997): 39-45.

In the following review, Crnkovic compares Death and the Maiden to other films in Polanski's oeuvre that explore the victimization of women, arguing that Death and the Maiden effectively places the spectator in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who is the victim and who is the aggressor.

I had already been in the United States for a few years when the war started in my homeland, the former Yugoslavia. As time passed, the images and reports of massacres, rape, shelling, and ethnic cleansing accumulated. And yet many of my American friends and acquaintances still could not see who was doing what to whom; they could not figure out their own position on this conflict. I asked them what made it so hard to see what was happening in this war...