The Tenant - A film that shows how sometimes relationships with neighbors can be quite complicated

Roman Polanski's psychological thriller The Tenant may start off kinda slow, but by the second half it spirals out of control into one of the most terrifying things ever filmed.

It takes place in France where a man named Trelkovsky (Polanski) moves into the apartment of a girl named Simone Choule who had recently committed suicide. The longer he lives there the more sure he becomes that it was the other tenants of the apartment building that drove Simone to kill herself. Now Trelkovsky believes their most recent scheme is to drive him to a similar fate while at the same time turn him into the deceased Simone herself. You get to see his psychological decay as odd things continue to happen, such as teeth appearing in his walls, and people standing in windows staring at him for hours.

I first heard about this movie when the actor Bruce Campbell mentioned it in an interview as the scariest movie he has ever seen. Campbell has starred in many lower-class horror films such as The Evil Dead. He knows that the quality of his work in the slasher/exploitation genre differs with Polanski's thriller, and that is why I felt compelled to check it out. As much as I respect and love Bruce Campbell, it takes more than buckets of blood and spewing guts to get me scared. So, I get excited whenever I hear about a movie that could genuinely scare me.

Upon viewing The Tenant I could fully understand where Bruce Campbell was coming from. What makes the movie scary is the fact that you never know if the other tenants really do have an evil plot, or if Trelkovsky is crazy and it's all a part of his imagination. If you like being comfortably confused by things as you try to make sense of them in your head, then this movie is splendidly designed for your pleasure.

One good aspect to the film is Polanski's interesting camera techniques which mimic Trelkovsky's road to insanity as the film progresses. He'll film a slanted shot of a staircase as people are walking on it and you'll feel like you're looking through the confused eyes of Trelkovsky himself.

It is obvious that English was not the original language that all the characters in the movie spoke in. So, if you are easily offended by some bad overdubbing than you might be put off. It shouldn't be a problem though considering the dialogue is not at all the most important thing in the movie. However there is one monologue spoken by Trelkovsky that I liked quite a bit. He speaks of the levels of importance of his various body parts, he says, "If you were to cut off my head, what would I say... Me and my head, or me and my body? What right has my head to call itself me?"

In all his films Polanski seems to delve into a lot of dark material, and this movie is no exception. So, what kind of stuff should you expect to see? You'll see someone get hit by a car, you'll see child abuse, transvestitism, bouncing human heads, and of course the occasional suicide. Probably the thing that disturbed me the most was one horrifyingly awful scream given from a woman in a full-body cast. That cry of mortal despair brought more fear to me than any horror movie's scream ever could.

If you're interested in seeing something that could mess with your head a little and show you the darker, more twisted side of human nature then see Roman Polanski's The Tenant. You might just end up getting a little freaked out.

Here is a video of people explaining why they think it was so scary