The Tenant: Polanski Completes the Apartment Trilogy

Roman Polanski’s The Tenant has spent fifty years being the one people forget. Ask a room to name his horror films and you will get Rosemary’s Baby instantly, Repulsion from the more committed, and then a pause. The Tenant is the third panel of a triptych that critics only later agreed to call the Apartment Trilogy, and it is the strangest, the most personal, and — I would argue — the one that reveals what the other two were about all along. It is also the one where Polanski cast himself as the victim, which turns out to be the whole game.

The trilogy, and where this sits in it

The through-line is architecture. In Repulsion, a South Kensington flat becomes the externalised interior of a young woman’s disintegrating mind, its walls sprouting hands and cracking open as her sanity does. In Rosemary’s Baby, a grand New York apartment building houses a conspiracy that a pregnant woman can sense and no one will confirm, the horror of being disbelieved by everyone you trust. The Tenant, made in Paris in 1976 and adapted from Roland Topor’s novel Le Locataire chimérique, takes both engines and runs them at once: the flat that reshapes the mind, and the building whose residents may be conspiring against you. It is the trilogy’s summation, and it plays like a man revisiting his own obsessions and deciding to inhabit them personally.

Polanski stars as Trelkovsky, a timid, unfailingly apologetic clerk of Polish extraction living in France — an outsider defined by his eagerness to give no offence. He rents a shabby Paris apartment whose previous tenant, a young woman named Simone Choule, threw herself from the window and lies dying in a hospital, swaddled head to foot in bandages. Trelkovsky moves in. And the building begins, with exquisite slowness, to close around him.

The horror of the accommodating man

What makes The Tenant frightening is that it locates its terror in politeness. Trelkovsky wants only to be a good neighbour. He apologises for existing. He accepts the concierge’s rudeness, the landlord’s petty rules, the neighbours’ complaints about noise he did not make. And the film’s insight — its genuinely unsettling one — is that this accommodating temperament is a door left unlocked. Because he will not assert himself, the building can pour its expectations into him. The neighbours knew Simone. They knew what she drank, how she took her coffee, what cigarettes she smoked. As they press these preferences on him, Trelkovsky begins, almost helpfully, to adopt them.

Polanski the director understood something about Polanski the actor that no other filmmaker could have used so precisely: the small, watchful, faintly haunted quality of the man reads as perpetual apology. Casting himself was the sharpest decision in the film. His own biography — the wartime childhood in occupied Kraków, the outsider moving through a European culture that never quite claims him — bleeds into Trelkovsky without a word of exposition. This is a horror film about the immigrant’s suspicion that the natives are watching, quietly deciding what he is allowed to become.

Why the paranoia works: the courtyard toilet

The single greatest device in The Tenant is a communal lavatory across the interior courtyard, visible from Trelkovsky’s window. In it, at night, he begins to see figures — residents standing motionless, facing his flat, doing nothing. It is a masterclass in the mechanics of dread, because it withholds interpretation completely. They are simply there. They do not move. And the film refuses to tell you whether they are real, whether they are watching him, whether they are watching at all, or whether he is manufacturing an audience for a persecution he needs to believe in.

Polanski shoots the building as a hostile geometry, wide-angle lenses bowing the corridors, the courtyard a well with the sky far above and the eyes all around. The apartment itself starts small and gets smaller, the way Repulsion’s did, until Trelkovsky is less a resident than a specimen in a jar the whole building is peering into. The genius of the toilet motif is that it makes surveillance ambient. There is no single villain to defeat. There is only the sense of being seen, everywhere, all the time, by people who will not admit they are doing it — the same suffocating disbelief that traps Rosemary, turned inside out so that the paranoiac is the one we ride along with.

The craft holding it together

Two collaborators keep the film from tipping into shapelessness. The cinematography is by Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s great cameraman, and his presence is felt in the way faces are lit — the close, unforgiving attention to Trelkovsky’s expressions, the slow drain of warmth from the palette as the flat closes in. Nykvist gives the paranoia a physical texture, the light itself going institutional and cold as the film proceeds. Philippe Sarde’s score works the opposite lever, sliding toward the nursery-tune uncanny in the way the best 1970s horror scores did, so that the menace arrives wearing something almost childish.

The other thing that holds it is the film’s willingness to be funny. The Tenant is threaded with a mordant, deadpan comedy that most write-ups ignore — the absurd escalation of neighbourly grievance, the concierge (Shelley Winters, gleefully sour) and the landlord Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas) delivering their petty tyrannies with straight faces, the sheer social farce of a man too polite to object while his life is quietly confiscated around him. The comedy is doing structural work. It keeps you off balance, unsure whether to laugh or brace, which is precisely the register a man losing his grip would experience. When the funny curdles, and it does, the drop is far steeper because you were smiling a moment earlier. Few directors trust an audience to hold amusement and terror in the same breath; Polanski builds the whole middle of the film on that instability.

The company it keeps

The Tenant belongs to a rich seam of 1970s films about a lone consciousness coming apart in a room it cannot leave, and it rewards being watched alongside its cousins. The obvious internal companions are the two films it completes, but its DNA runs into the wider decade too. The quiet, ambiguous American dread of a woman who cannot trust her own perceptions, the animating question of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, is the same doubt Trelkovsky lives inside — is the world conspiring, or is the mind manufacturing the conspiracy? Both films refuse to resolve it, and both are stronger for the refusal.

Reach back further and the film’s real ancestor is the literature of persecution — Kafka above all, and the specifically European horror of bureaucratic, communal, unprovable menace. Topor’s source novel sits in that tradition, and Polanski, a survivor of the century’s worst version of the neighbours deciding what you were, was the ideal translator. Where an American filmmaker might have supplied a monster, Polanski supplies a lease.

The verdict

The Tenant is the least ingratiating of the three apartment films, and that is exactly why it has aged into the most interesting. It has none of Rosemary’s Baby’s glossy dread and none of Repulsion’s pure formal shock. It is claustrophobic, mordantly funny in stretches, and it asks you to sit inside a deteriorating mind for two hours with no promise of relief. But it completes an argument the other two films could only gesture at: that the horror of the apartment is the horror of the self, and that a person who will not defend the boundary of what they are can be talked, room by room, into becoming someone else. It is Polanski’s most autobiographical horror film, and the one where the outsider stops watching the disintegration and volunteers for it.

If you have only seen the famous two, this is the film that turns them from a pair into a system. Watch all three in order and The Tenant stops being the forgotten one and becomes the key.

Spoilers below

The mechanism of the film is dissolution of identity, and Polanski runs it with terrible patience. Trelkovsky finds Simone’s tooth hidden in a hole in the wall, wrapped in cotton. He begins wearing her clothes, her makeup, a wig — first in secret, then compulsively. He orders her brand of cigarettes without meaning to. The neighbours’ small corrections accumulate until he is convinced they are a coordinated project to turn him into Simone so that he will do what she did: jump. His only ally, Stella (Isabelle Adjani), a friend of the dying Simone’s, cannot reach him through the closing walls of his conviction.

The ending is the film’s cruellest and cleverest stroke. Trelkovsky, now fully persuaded that the whole building is arranged as an audience for his death, climbs to Simone’s window and throws himself out — in front of the assembled residents, who cheer. He survives the first fall, drags his shattered body back up the stairs, and jumps a second time, because one death was not enough to complete the transformation. And then the film folds in on itself: he wakes in the hospital, bandaged head to foot exactly as Simone was in the opening, and sees, at his bedside, Stella and himself — Trelkovsky, whole, staring in horror at the bandaged screaming figure in the bed. The loop closes. The new tenant has arrived to watch the old one die, and the old one is him. It is the same trap as Rosemary’s Baby — a conspiracy the victim cannot prove and the audience cannot fully confirm — inverted so that the paranoiac may have been building his own cage from the inside. Polanski leaves the ambiguity intact, and it is the ambiguity, and not the fall, that lingers.