Shop top categories that ship internationally
To share your reaction on this item, open the Amazon app from the App Store or Google Play on your phone.
Similar items shipping to Austria
AT
Austria
See All Buying Options
Added to

Sorry, there was a problem.

There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Please try again.

Sorry, there was a problem.

List unavailable.

Repulsion (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Catherine Deneuve (Actor), Roman Polanski (Director) Rated:
NR
Format: Blu-ray
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 743 ratings
IMDb7.6/10.0
Additional Blu-ray options Edition Discs
Price
New from Used from
Blu-ray —
1
$19.04
$11.55 $27.99
Blu-ray
July 28, 2009
Criterion Collection
1
—
$29.72 $20.00
Blu-ray — —
—
$45.99 —
Watch Instantly with Rent Buy
Repulsion — —
Genre Mystery & Suspense
Format NTSC, Blu-ray, Special Edition, Widescreen, Black & White
Contributor Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski
Language English
Runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes

From the manufacturer

Repulsion cover

Roman Polanski’s suspense classic—one of cinema’s most shocking psychological thrillers starring Catherine Deneuve

Shadow

Noise

Call

Product Description

Roman Polanski followed up his international breakthrough Knife in the Water with this controversial, chilling tale of psychosis, starring Catherine Deneuve as Carole, a fragile, frigid young beauty cracking up over the course of a terrifying weekend. Left alone by her vacationing sister in their London flat, Carole is haunted by Specter's real and imagined, and her insanity grows to a violent pitch. Thanks to it's unforgettable attention to disturbing detail and Polanski's unparalleled adeptness at turning claustrophobic space into an emotional minefield, Repulsion remains one of cinema's most shocking psychological thrillers. Special edition features: New, restored high-definition digital transfer, Audio commentary featuring director Roman Polanski and actress Catherine Deneuve, a British Horror Film (2003), a documentary on the making of Repulsion, featuring interviews with Polanski, producer Gene Gutowski, and cinematographer Gil Taylor, a 1964 television documentary filmed on the set of Repulsion, featuring rare footage of Polanski and Deneuve at work, Theatrical trailer, Plus: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar and curator Bill Horrigan.

Product details

  • Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.66:1
  • Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
  • MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
  • Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 3.53 ounces
  • Item model number ‏ : ‎ CRRN1823BR
  • Director ‏ : ‎ Roman Polanski
  • Media Format ‏ : ‎ NTSC, Blu-ray, Special Edition, Widescreen, Black & White
  • Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 45 minutes
  • Release date ‏ : ‎ July 28, 2009
  • Actors ‏ : ‎ Catherine Deneuve
  • Studio ‏ : ‎ Criterion Collection
  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0026VBOJ2
  • Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 743 ratings

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
743 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Top reviews from the United States

  • Doreen Appleton
    5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular widescreen DVD
    Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2009
    Verified Purchase
    After reading the Amazon reviews to the effect that the Criterion DVD was horrible, "as though dubbed from a VHS," I didn't buy it. But when I got it from Netflix, I realized that it is both widescreen and magnificently made. This was a revelation, because when I saw it in the theater it was full screen, and every VHS or DVD up to now was full screen. I ordered it immediately.

    The thing that most impressed me the first time I saw REPULSION was the final tracking shot through the apartment, past the artifacts of Carol's insanity, to the picture of Carol's family in Belgium, and then closer to the picture and all the way into Carol's eye. I wonder if Polanski was nodding to PSYCHO, in which the camera zooms down the drain of the shower and then out onto the dead eye of Janet Leigh.

    Concerning the commentary, it is interesting that as filmmakers get older, they forget things. In his autobiography, Polanski said there was to be a third murder, when the sister's boyfriend comes back unexpectedly from his vacation. Carol was going to kill him, but Polanski thought three murders would be too much.

    In the commentary Polanski says it is the wife of the boyfriend (whom Carol kills with the candlestick) who was to appear and be murdered. Indeed, there is the voice of an irate woman on the phone, and we see a woman across the street.

    I was somewhat disappointed when Polanski and Catherine Deneuve were talking about other things as Carol touches the light switch and the wall splits apart with a dull roar. I thought this particular special effect made the movie, because it wasn't gothic or ethereal like most special effects, it was frighteningly concrete and physical. The theme of the cracking, splitting, sundering, has a long history in philosophy and literature. It was a key to Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO (the ravine), Gilles Deleuze's Logique du sens (la fêlure), F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-up," Maurice Blanchot's critical essays. It signifies a whole that is cracked, split in such a fundamental way that it can never become a whole, and indeed never was a whole in the first place. Polanski's genius was to select this as a visual theme at age 28, knowing nothing about schizophrenia (etymology "the SPLITTING of the mind"), and make the most of it.

    In my opinion, the hands coming out of the wall, which was done by Cocteau, is a bit more gothic, less original, than the cracking of the walls.

    Given the girl's extreme sexual anxiety, which is the motive for the two murders and the three fantasies of rape, one would have to give a cloacal significance to the crack as well. Behind the crack is evil, darkness, feces, concupiscence. The theme of decay -- the rotting rabbit, the eyes growing out of the potatoes -- is a concomitant of this. Behind the crack is unwholeness, unwholesomeness, the fermentation and dissolution of all things. Related to this is the dripping of the faucet, the oozing, the softening of all that was once solid and secure -- hence the softening of the walls into clay.

    There are details so subtle that even Polanski probably doesn't remember them. For instance, when the sister's boyfriend moves toward Carol to pinch her cheeks, he touches the back of his own neck. This foreshadows the landlord convulsively clutching the back of his neck after Carol slashes him with the razor.

    There is a fine irony to the men approaching her sexually without an inkling of the risk they are running. All they see is female flesh; they can't see her insanity. The sister's boyfriend, who has coveted her from the outset, finally has a completely catatonic Carol in his arms at the end as the police are on their way.

    The movie abounds with sexual symbolism. Carol is upset that her sister's boyfriend puts his razor and his toothbrush in her glass; both those phallic objects enter the glass like a penis. She is unnerved at the sight of her glove coming off her fingers -- another image of penetration, akin to a condom. The razor fascinates her not only because it is phallic in its form, but because it hints at castration. The shocking moment when she cuts the finger of the woman she is manicuring, followed almost immediately by her friend's discovery of the rabbit's head in Carol's purse, confirms the theme of castration.

    In any case, I agree with those who say this was Polanski's most inspired film. The movements of his camera are so original that they can't really be compared to those of any filmmaker. Perhaps Renoir at his best...

    The theme of hallucination was an inspiration by Polanski and Brach. The true terror of the movie is that the images haunting the girl are not real. No one can rescue her, because the attacker is in her mind. There is no escape.

    Most amazing of all, we learn in the special features that there was no money for special effects, so the crew had to create them. REPULSION is one of the greatest special effects movies ever made.

    The short special feature "Grand écran" is wonderful, because it shows Polanski telling Deneuve where to move, how to use her body, how to use her hands. This is a precious opportunity to see a masterpiece in the making.

    Those who say the transfer is horrible are, pardon the turn of phrase, hallucinating.
    10 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Randy Keehn
    5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Turn the Lights Out
    Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2006
    Verified Purchase
    I am becoming a big fan of Roman Polanski's films. In the last year or so I have had the chance to see his first film, "Knife in the Water", and his most recent film, "The Pianist". Both films showed the brilliant directing skills that Polanski possesses. This made me curious about some of his earlier films which is why I recently purchased "Repulsion".

    "Repulsion" is a movie about a young woman who has a deep-seeded repulsion (I was looking for the right word for it and I guess the title is appropriate) to sex. Although not your usual plot, there are probably many things that could be done with this theme from comedy (think Woody Allen) to sensitive love story. Polanski took it to the macabre and horrific with a result that will haunt viewers for years. This is a movie that explores the darkness of the mind in a brilliant mix of fantasy and reality. It is so well done that, once the basic outline of the story has been set, most viewers will be unsure if what they are seeing at any given point is real or imagined. There is enough that IS real to leave us emotionally exhausted by the time full reality returns. In the end we are left with a view of what a deranged mind might look at. That is all the more impressive by use of the innocent-appearing subject played by Catherine Deneuve. Her acting, as well as that of the rest of the cast, is excellent but it is the directing that is the key to the success of "Repulsion". The known and the unknown, the innocent and the brash, the real and the imagined, all are interspliced to keep us on edge and unsure of what we are seeing.

    As a rather pointless personal aside, I realized during the film, that it had been the subject of a photo layout in the first "Playboy" magazine I ever purchased in my adolecence. I guess I mention that because the DVD cover coyly suggests that this is a story of "the nightmare of a virgin's dreams becomes the screens shcking reality". I watched it alone lest the subject matter was inappropriate and, I found out that it is inappropriate for younger audiences although not for the reasons I had suspected. This movie deals with sexuality without exploiting the subject. There are visual and audial "suggestions" but they do not cross the line. However, the film is disturbing, to say the least. There are many scenes that will stay with you including one involving a door mirror in motion that was as shocking as any scene I've ever seen. Yet even this is misleading. There is a purpose to everything in "Repulsion" which re-iterates my praise for the director's skills. Many people may find the film's title an apt discription of their reaction to seeing this movie. However, it tells a dark tale eloquently.
    12 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • mif
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent DVD
    Reviewed in France on February 1, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Article bien reçu
    Bon film
    Report
  • jack
    5.0 out of 5 stars Classique de Roman Polanski
    Reviewed in Canada on January 7, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    Le produit est arrivé dans les délais prévus dans un bon emballage et impeccable.
    Cela faisait un bail que je ne l'avais pas vu et...ouf! très dérangeant! Catherine Deneuve joue ce rôle à merveille, celui d'une demoiselle schizophrène hanté par un passé troublant dû à une liaison incestueuse avec son père. Disons que tout au long du film, elle n'est vraiment "plus là"! Elle n'aime pas les hommes et les...tue violemment. Polanski, à qui l'on doit un autre classique "Le Bébé de Rosemary", signe ici un film grandiose.
    Report
  • Manuele
    5.0 out of 5 stars PERFETTO! :)
    Reviewed in Italy on January 30, 2022
    Verified Purchase
    TOP!
    Report
  • Martin Sauter
    5.0 out of 5 stars masterpiece!
    Reviewed in Germany on March 9, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    a masterpiece in every way!
    Report
  • spaceodds
    5.0 out of 5 stars Realism and the mundane has never been so terrifying.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Roman Polanski's Repulsion was his second feature film, and his English language debut. Made as a compromise after he tried to sell his initial screenplay entitled When Katelbach Comes (which would be made a year after Repulsion under the title of Cul De Sac) Polanski has described this film as his potboiler, and a means to an end which took him no more than seventeen days to submit the final screenplay to B Movie shlock producers Compton Films.

    Despite his initial dismissal, Polanski has obviously come to appreciate this film and has never shyed away from it. Hardly surprising because it is probably the most vivid and compelling psychological thriller ever made. Coming of the success of Hitchcock's Psycho, many mainstream and B movie filmmakers tried to jump onto the bandwagon, with mixed results. Polanski meanwhile gave the stagnated genre a new lease of life that consentrated obsessively on the mundane. Instead of the shy and timid man who lives in the outskirts in a Gothic countryhouse, we've got Carol, a Belgium immigrant who shares a flat with her sexually active older sister in 60s South Kensington.

    Instead of jump scares and jolts, Repulsion plays out slowly. From the opening shot of Carol's vacant eye and face, Polanski goes the literal route and he slowly builds up the tension through Carol's mundane life. Another factor of Carol's psychosis is her constant exposure to sex, workmen and suitors continually pounce on her; and all she wants is to be left alone. It is when she is finally left alone, when her sister goes away on holiday with her lover (who is married) that Carol's world deterioates. What could have been exploitative and over the top in the hands of another filmmaker, Polanski instead revels in Carol's 'visions' by creating simple, yet highly effective set pieces. Walls crack, imaginary men 'rape' Carol in a sucession of fast cuts and a ticking clock, only for the scene to end when we hear the loud sounds of a doorbell.

    It is the mundane and the everyday sounds that we associate with that makes this film shocking and uncomfortable. Despite this being a psychological thriller, it can also be seen as a slice of 60 London. During the mid 60s many films prided itself on being about the times, and yet Repulsion oddly enough is one of the most realistic films made about the period. How many films were there during this period about what it was like for a young female immigrant living in 60's South Kensington? And how was it like for her to simply live in this society.

    Repulsion is a horrific delight and is a perfect antidote to grusome horrors that were to come. Along with Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant, Repulsion served as the opening film of Polanski's informal trilogy of urban paranoia, and the best way to see this film is on the blu-ray Criterion released a few years back. The Criterion blu-ray has a digital remaster that revitilises Gill Taylor's ice cold black and white cinematography, making the film more alert and visceral. Contrast and clarity are superb with plenty of healthy grain. The sound, an LPCM 1.0 track, is also fantastic, Chico Hamilton's lurid score has never sounded so great and lurid, whilst clairty and detail to sounds such as cars travelling and door bells are so hightened that they give the film an edge. Not to mention the extras, ported over from Anchor Bay's phenoemnal DVD released back in 2002/2003 are brilliant and informative.

    Overall Repulsion is a slow burning, but very memorable experience. Polanski may go on to direct classics such as Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, but here he shows his knack at what he's best. Leading the audience on a journey through madness and chaos, all against an all too real and familier backdrop.
    Report