Very disappointing...

recommended

Am I Missing Something?

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Roman Polanski's masterpiece – The Tenant succeeds to reach our hearts and makes us give further thought about multiple issues brought up in the movie. Simple in style, it is very dynamic. After watching the movie my first thought was that I did not care about the mystery that lies beneath it. I did not care about the plot twist in the end of the movie. I think this movie is important even without that mystery. The sense of loneliness, lack of communication, feeling of being driven by the society and a lot of other aspects makes this movie very valuable.Even though it was shot in 1976, I think it is even more important in our era. The most important issue for me in this movie was the desire of all people in our lives to modify our behavior in accordance to their preferences. This egoistic attitude was most expressly demonstrated by Trelkovsky's obnoxious neighbors, who did not respect his private life and requested absolute obedience from him. But neighbors were not the only ones who did it. The same was done by Trelkovsky's friends. They mocked and criticized him for being weak and with this attitude made it even worse for him to cope with the difficulty of the situation. More than that, this modification gradually transformed into destruction of personality. I loved the scene from Trelkovsky's friend's flat, where he demonstrates his supremacy to Trelkovsky when he clearly insults his neighbor who asked him to make the music low because his wife was ill. The friend tells Trelkovsky that he does not give a damn for his neighbors' situations and thus gives him advice to do the same thing. So where is the margin that lies between our private lives and infringement of other people's private lives by protecting our own. What hurt me the most about the movie was that Trelkovsky tried so hard to be civil, tried to adjust to his neighbors' wishes and desires, did not want to engage in any conflict, but he was continually insulted. As if all people around him understood he was feeble and civilized and used this against him. Instead of opposing those who relentlessly insulted him, Trelkovsky hits the child who had nothing to do with it and finally goes mad. Watching all this happening was very hard. And there are so many other issues you can go on and on about. 10 of 10. The movie is terrific.

An intricately plotted & skilfully layered study of urban paranoia & mental disintegration, the third & final entry in Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy is a highly ambiguous & utterly mystifying psychological thriller that utilises all the elements prevalent in the previous entries of this unofficial trilogy but may also polarise its viewers due to its drowsy pace & lack of transparency.The Tenant (also known as Le Locataire) tells the story of a quiet, timid & inconspicuous man who moves into a Parisian apartment after its previous occupant commits suicide but soon finds himself being unreasonably reprimanded by his landlord & neighbours and begins suspecting that they are all plotting a scheme to transform him into the last tenant so that he too will follow her fate.Directed by Roman Polanski, The Tenant finds the notable filmmaker carrying the entire film on his shoulders not just from behind the camera but also from the front as he plays the lead character here & delivers a deftly-measured performance. The mental instability of the new tenant is hinted numerous times throughout the story plus his eventual descent into madness is expertly illustrated.Cinematography makes sure that the protagonist is always the focal point of camera, resulting in him being present in every sequence. Almost all the unfolding events are shown from his perspective, which in turn explains the surreal imagery that, just like his mental state, only gets more brooding & disturbing as plot progresses while the pale, colourless Parisian streets exemplify how he views the world around him.Editing is methodically carried out, making sure that the film stays intriguing despite its perplexing structure, but the pace is really sluggish at times, especially in the first half. The story does come full circle over the course of its runtime but still leaves much to ponder about by concluding on an ambiguous note. The supporting cast doesn't have enough material to base their renditions upon but they still do a fine job in their given roles.On an overall scale, The Tenant is competently crafted & masterly composed plus there is a lot to admire about Polanski's attention to details but it is also tedious & overdone, not to mention that its slow-burn narration, enigmatic arrangement & lethargic pace turns it into one of those movies that viewers either embrace tightly or reject outright. Covering all the themes that were addressed in both Repulsion & Rosemary's Baby, in addition to a few more, The Tenant is divisive but it's also stimulating in its own wicked ways. Multiple viewings advised.

Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski) is a meek bureaucrat in Paris. He rents an apartment whose previous tenant Egyptologist Simone Choule jumped out the window. She goes to the hospital to find Stella (Isabelle Adjani) with her friend Simone completely bandaged. His neighbor complains about his noisy party. There are strange things happening and he's getting paranoid about the other people in the building.There is a nice sense of impending doom. The whole movie is a series of slightly off situations. It feels Kafkaesque. Roman Polanski is not a good enough actor to bring out that intense paranoia or that disturbed frustration. The movie does ramble around and it needs a more compelling lead to take charge. It goes off in some maddening avenues. I actually don't like the dueling point of views between the real world and his perception. It would be better to stay only with his surreal visions until the final scenes.

'The Tenant' is the final film in Roman Polanski's unofficial trilogy of films about apartment dwellers gradually succumbing to their paranoia. Like Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, it is about the protagonist's own perception of what's being "done to him" and exists only in the darkest recesses of his own mind.It tells the story of the strange series of occupations that take place when Mr. Trelkovsky (a fabulously understated Polanski himself), a filing clerk in a library, moves into a two-room Paris apartment made vacant by the attempted suicide of the previous tenant. Small boned and physically vulnerable, he seems to be aware of having put off people all his life. Thus he goes to great lengths to avoid offending his neighbors.Little by little, Trelkovsky comes to suspect that the other tenants in the building have somehow been responsible for the earlier tenant's suicide attempt. He suffers persecution from apparently everyone in sight. The concierge and his landlord monitor his arrivals and departures. A housewarming party for his bullying colleagues excites complaints about his alleged boisterousness. He nearly lands a gorgeous girl but shrinks away when he suspects she's in on the conspiracy. A mysterious woman appears at his door with her crippled daughter to report that there's a conspiracy afoot to have her kicked out of the building. A busybody turns against him when he refuses to sign a petition to evict the woman but this lone heroic stand means that when the persecuted woman takes a dump on every other tenant's doormat, he has to scoop up some excrement and put it outside his own flat so he won't be blamed. But he answers all the unaccountable rudeness with infinite patience. One morning when he wakes up in full drag, missing the tooth that the dead girl was missing, he is finally convinced that his tenants are engaged in a conspiracy to drive him to suicide by forcing him to take on the personality of the dead woman. All this leads to a scandalous double climax that is still among the most despairing in cinema.'The Tenant' works so well is because it isn't so much a psychological portrait of grief as it is an unnerving acknowledgement of the ambiguous nature of the world. It displays Polanski's clear-eyed narrative discipline, with a creepiness that seeps right into your bones and never lets up. His nightmare vision of the apartment building as an almost living and completely malevolent entity remains unmatched by anyone in its astonishing hallucinatory horrors. Via seemingly simple albeit absurd exchanges, with flashes of black humor, he brilliantly evokes an evil society's almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.The Tenant is a chilling exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that overwhelmingly solipsistic and ultimately alienating.