THE TENANT 1976

Inside the Walls: Polanski’s Haunting Symphony of Paranoia and Identity in The Tenant

Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people!”

If you’re drawn to the tense, closed-in mood that thrillers of ’70s cinema offer, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) unfolds like a dark lesson in psychological horror, a slow-burning descent into madness and estrangement in the labyrinth of the city, where the boundaries between identity and environment dissolve. A surreal horror thriller that explores themes of isolation, identity dissolution, and the oppressive power dynamics within urban living, with the director building a hypnotic demonstration of control and craft in his signature style. The story is based on Roland Topor’s 1964 novel and completes Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy,” following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, cementing his reputation for exploring fractured psyches through atmospheric urban settings.

Set within the pale, oppressive walls of a Paris apartment building, the film follows Trelkovsky, a timid Polish bureaucrat (played by Polanski himself), who rents a flat with a sinister history: its previous occupant, Simone Choule, has attempted suicide by leaping from the apartment window.

From the film’s first moments, Polanski’s vision is clear, he is less interested in grisly spectacle and more intent on exploring how the silent watch, the weight of the eyes of society, its rules and expectations, can gnaw away at a fragile sense of self, reducing it to a state of spectral uncertainty, the anchor of those watchful eyes dragging him down.

Polanski manifests this vividly through the film’s surreal atmosphere and its exploration of fraught psychological concepts at play. He constructs a cinematic world where reality and nightmare bleed into one another, spilling out of the cracks in Trelkovsky’s mounting paranoia and existential dread, seeping from the feverish edges of his mind. What we’re shown is just the terrifying fragility of personal identity, how easily a sense of self can crack under the constant pressure of ever-watchful neighbors and silent, collective stares, suspicious, judging faces, and the quiet machinery of psychological manipulation.

You can really see how the film digs into that uneasy feeling of social alienation and the burden of being watched and judged. The weight of other people’s scrutiny and all that social pressure can start to chip away at the foundations of who you are, blurring the edges of your identity until those lines are barely distinguishable from the suffocating world around you.

Polanski turns the apartment itself, and its inhabitants lurking behind those walls, into living, breathing symbols of this claustrophobic paranoia, showing just how easily the boundaries between victim and persecutor, self and other, can be worn down and eventually fade away.

In order to get under our skin, Polanski achieves a surreal effect primarily by his manipulation of perspective and space. The Parisian apartment building isn’t just a physical setting, but it actually starts to feel like a reflection of Trelkovsky’s own mind. Hallways twist and turn in weird ways, spaces seem to repeat or fold in on themselves, and pretty soon, it’s hard to tell who’s watching whom. The line between observer and observed collapses. Moments like Trelkovsky stumbling across strange hieroglyphs in the bathroom or catching a glimpse of his own double outside the window perfectly capture that uncanny, dream-like quality running through the whole film.

Sven Nykvist’s cinematography is beautifully attuned to Polanski’s unsettling, surreal vision. His disorienting camera lingers on a cold, pastel-tinged palette, soft greens, grays, and muted tones, creating a feeling of unreality and suspended stillness, delicately poised as the film gradually closes in on itself.

Nykvist’s static shots and subdued colors, subtle yet deliberate, give the apartment interiors an almost washed-out, oppressive quality. Everything inside, from the décor to the wardrobe and lighting, hangs in a quiet balance that perfectly mirrors Trelkovsky’s intense psychological unraveling. The city outside, the constricting urban environment of Paris, seems indifferent and inhospitable, as Trelkovsky’s world shrinks. This use of color and tones that shift from neutral and observational to increasingly unsettling also leans into the vision of a world that feels all at once ordinary, yet disturbingly off-kilter and hostile, underscoring the film’s themes of isolation and an identity that will soon become broken.

His shots evoke a slow suffocation; with haunting moments, a view across the courtyard where neighbors stand motionless, they become silhouettes, always watching, always judging, an unforgettable image of the tenants peering from the communal restroom like figures out of a Kafka nightmare. It’s a world where every knock on the wall, every muffled conversation, is a threat. Every detail reinforces the film’s chilling descent into paranoia and loss of identity, all a chilling dream-like motif of voyeurism and invasion.

These faces in the frame become the Invisible Monsters of The Tenant. At its core, the film is steeped in the anxieties of being watched and the uneasy experience of watching others in all its unsettling forms. It functions as a perpetual loop of observation and violation.

Trelkovsky is routinely spied upon by his neighbors who furtively gaze at him through the peephole in his door, windows, and thin walls; he himself becomes a watcher, peering nervously across the courtyard where the other tenants stand quietly in the communal bathroom, their eyes fixed on him. And in one tense hospital scene, when he visits Simone Choule, she quietly studies him. This sense of surveillance is mutual and escalating, and the more Trelkovsky observes, the greater his fear of being observed grows, fueling his paranoid descent.

While the film maintains a superficially realistic style, the deliberate use of the camera’s visual language, particularly the panning shots, underscores the story’s pervasive themes of voyeurism. The window often acts as a surrogate for the camera, a peephole into private worlds and forbidden desires.

As The Tenant unfolds, daily life turns into a “theater of judgment,” with every glance from neighbors (or us) feeling like an evaluation, warping ordinary interactions with a sinister sense of performance.

You can say that The Tenant’s obsession with voyeurism, of watching and being watched, can be tied to deeper feelings of social anxiety and isolation. Trelkovsky’s sense of always being “seen but never really known”, whether because he’s a foreigner or simply the new tenant stepping into the shoes of someone who tried to end their life, creates a delicate balance, builds a tightrope walk, between the face he presents to the world and the self he keeps hidden. And that tension only grows stronger under the constant prying eyes of everyone around him. The Tenant is rich with the logic of voyeurism, both as a literal plot mechanism and as a metaphor for the fragility of identity under the watchful, unyielding, condemning eyes of society and neighbors. The director uses this fixation to explore paranoia, loss of self, and the oppressive power dynamics that come with living close to others in shared, crowded urban spaces.

The film’s stellar, quirky cast grounds this psychological unease in vivid character: Polanski in the central role of Trelkovsky, whose nervous, mild-mannered demeanor hides profound psychological turmoil. His reflective and sometimes fragmented monologues, such as his grotesque internal dialogue while trying on Simone’s shoes, reveal his crumbling psyche. Isabelle Adjani brings an emotional ambiguity as Stella, who flits between sympathy and distance, a confidante whose role blurs the lines between ally and potential conspirator. The formidable Melvyn Douglas, as the landlord Monsieur Zy, is icily civil but never far from menace. He’s the landowner whose cold surveillance amplifies Trelkovsky’s fears.

Shelley Winters and Jo Van Fleet bring memorable, deeply textured performances to The Tenant as they help close the trap around Trelkovsky. Their fierce concern for the building’s order masks a quiet antagonism. Both performances are layered with suspicion and eccentric precision. Winters plays the surly, sharp-tongued concierge who mixes menace with dark humor. Her portrayal as a forceful presence (all too often overlooked yet, as usual, stellar) adds an unsettling edge to the building’s atmosphere. Her character has a biting, world-weary wit and a mischievous cruelty, trolling Trelkovsky with both jokes and veiled threats, which adds to the building’s feeling of claustrophobia and hostility. Jo Van Fleet, though in a more minor role, channels a commanding toughness wrapped in quiet menace. Known for playing tough types, she carries a haunting intensity and unconstrained violence that keeps you on edge. Even with limited screen time, her presence is still riveting, imbuing the world around Trelkovsky with an ominous weight, an embodiment of the oppressive, judgmental social environment he faces. Together, Winters and Van Fleet are living embodiments of the suspicion, cruelty, and suffocating social pressure that haunt Trelkovsky throughout the film. I can’t help but light up at the mention of Shelley Winters and Jo Van Fleet; there’s just something magnetic about the way they command the screen. Their performances throughout their careers have always been a storm of unyielding spirit, making even the smallest moments unforgettable. I’ve always adored the depth and unpredictability they bring, both in their roles and in the larger-than-life presence that seems to follow them from film to film. Watching either of them work is one of cinema’s great pleasures for me. 

Trelkovsky is a uniquely riveting figure, a gentle, almost painfully self-effacing, awkwardness, and the embodiment of a character who journeys from meek, careful tenant to a shattered, paranoiac soul overwhelmed by the gaze and judgment of those around him, making his alienation palpable. As the narrative progresses, Trelkovsky becomes increasingly internalized: every nervous glance, stammer, and bodily hesitation heightens our sense of unease and identification with his plight.

He finds himself drawn to this towering, narrow apartment building, Gothic in its quiet gloom, where, by some twist of fate, there’s a room available high up on the top floor. Good luck for Trelkovsky, or so it seems at first, until he discovers the vacancy comes with a ghost: the last tenant flung herself from the window. During his tour, he can’t help but lean out and look down, tracing the air to the very spot where her story ended.

Trelkovsky rents the apartment once inhabited by Simone Choule. The concierge (Winters) states, “The previous tenant threw herself out the window,” she states matter-of-factly, grounding the film’s premise in a chilling sense of everyday normalcy. “You can still see where she fell,” she adds.

Before settling in, he crosses paths with a surly Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas), who grumbles about the woman who’d tried to take her own life and all the chaos she left behind. This leans back on the events, giving the building itself a haunted undercurrent that never wholly dissipates. Trelkovsky tries to ease his worries, saying he’s just a quiet bachelor, but the old man shoots back with a knowing smirk, “Bachelors can be a problem, too.”

His journey unfolds scene by scene, but without overt signposts. Early on, he visits Simone Choule in the hospital, where she lies comatose, her body bandaged, her face half-erased, and meets Stella (Adjani), who is shaken, grieving, and generous with concern, whose emotional distress foreshadows the psychological cascade Trelkvosky is about to endure. As Trelkovsky settles into the apartment, the pressure from his neighbors intensifies; the atmosphere thickens, and strange, subtle occurrences begin to escalate. Even his minor habits, despite his attempts to be unobtrusive, a glass set down too heavily, friends visiting late, trigger complaints and cold rebukes.

He discovers a human tooth hidden in a hole in the wall, finds himself watched from every angle, and senses that he is being judged for transgressions he cannot name. The sense of surveillance grows unbearable: at night, neighbors appear frozen, assembled in the bathroom with the stillness of conspirators. Each scene unspools the invisible web suffocating Trelkovsky’s spirit, even as he tries desperately to conform to communal expectations. As the film moves along, that uneasy sense of being under scrutiny, a constant, prickling awareness that every move might be noted, just keeps tightening its grip.

In The Tenant, the pressure to conform becomes so intense that it veers into the realm of absurdist drama, with Trelkovsky’s desperate attempts to fit in ultimately erasing his own identity. The film satirizes the extremes of societal conformity, revealing how the demands of the community push ordinary existence into the bizarre and jolting ripples of discord and unrest in the soul.

Gradually, the apartment’s psychological pressure pushes Trelkovsky to the edge. He begins adopting Simone’s persona, repeating her habits, and beginning to dress in her clothes and apply her makeup, in a disturbing blurring of identity, not to mention his internal monologue, fragmented and haunted, which shows a psyche morphing under the strain of hostile observation.

Slipping into Simone’s skin and retracing her final moments feels less like imitation and more like getting swept up in a storm of borrowed lives and borrowed pain. It’s as if the relentless pressures swirling around Trelkovsky have worn away his boundaries, fragmenting his grasp on who he is, picking up pieces of another person until his own reflection grows strange and unfamiliar. In this tangled masquerade, the city’s silent demands and invisible bruises steer him toward a fate that’s never truly his, but becomes his all the same.

The climax arrives as he vandalizes Stella’s apartment, convinced she is part of a vast plot against him, and with violent confusion: Trelkovsky destroying what little human contact he has left. The film reaches its horrific conclusion with Trelkovsky unsuccessfully flinging himself from the window, not once, but twice. The first jump: After spiraling further into paranoia, dressed in Simone’s clothes, Trelkovsky throws himself out the window in front of his neighbors, hallucinating their cheers. The second jump: He survives the initial fall, and when the police arrive moments later, he manages to crawl back to his apartment and jumps again. His identity finally surrendered to the will of the building and its inhabitants.

One of the most striking scenes in The Tenant that best illustrates the film’s fluid, dream-like narrative style is when Trelkovsky, deep in his psychological unraveling, investigates the communal bathroom where he has long spied neighbors standing motionless for hours. In this sequence, he discovers a wall inexplicably covered with hieroglyphs, a surreal, otherworldly detail that threads past and present, fantasy and reality, together. As he stares out the window, he is horrified to see another figure watching him through binoculars from the opposite apartment; in a jarring, impossible twist, that figure is himself, occupying his own flat. The camera floats with measured precision, hallways seem to bend and warp, and time feels nonlinear, all trademark features of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography that give the entire episode a fevered, hallucinatory quality.

This scene dissolves any boundary between Trelkovsky’s fears and reality, leaving us lost within his waking nightmare. Polanski’s technique here blurs the chain of events, making it hard to tell what causes what, looping back on itself so that the narrative progresses like a lucid dream, bizarre, hyperreal, disorienting, and deeply unsettling. The hallucinations, warped spaces, and the unnerving doubling of Trelkovsky as his own observer distill it to its most honest, purest form of the film’s hypnotic, surreal flow and signature dream logic.

The Tenant received mixed critical reception at the time of its release. Critics were divided; Roger Ebert found the film’s spiraling paranoia compelling but ultimately frustrating, and the finale “ridiculous” in its most intense, extreme expression. The film is a bleak, Kafkaesque, nightmarish allegory and a chilling social commentary on modern urban alienation that immigrants and outsiders often endure.

The dry, deadpan humor threaded throughout didn’t soften the impact, if anything, it heightened the horror of its ordinary setting with its mixture of disturbing psychological horror and sometimes its humor swallowed by cold silence.

Psychologically, The Tenant reveals a study of the impact of social rejection and creeping hostility that chip away at a person’s sense of self. Trelkovsky’s slow transformation into Simone Choule isn’t just a slide into madness; it’s the result of being trapped under a relentless, suffocating gaze of a ‘faceless menace’ that hides behind the ordinary faces and routines of city life, swallowing him whole. In a way, it’s a haunting portrait of how the self can dissolve when pushed too hard from the outside and shaken from within by fear.

The apartment ceases to be a refuge; instead, it embodies the past trauma and collective hostility that coerce Trelkovsky’s breakdown, a stage upon which Trelkovsky’s undoing plays out. What once seemed mere eccentricity in his neighbors deepens into something cruel: their insistence on conformity erodes Trelkovsky’s individual character, leaving only a ‘hollow echo’ where identity used to be.

In the end, The Tenant is a complex, unsettling film that weaves together a vision of paranoia, sexual repression, madness, alienation, and the dissolution of self in the face of the sharp edges of silent, social judgment. It’s a chilling portrait of urban isolation and the strange, suffocating mechanisms by which our environment can consume us from within. And its horror lies in the banality of evil and the capacity for ordinary places and people to become monstrous through indifference, exclusion, and quiet malice.

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