GOING MAD

Screen goddess Catherine Deneuve is the main attraction in Roman Polanski’s sickening 1965 English language debut, Repulsion. As a Belgian manicurist consumed by sexual confusion and frustration (gross men leer at her on the harsh London streets; her in flagrante delicto sister moans through the apartment walls), Deneuve generates a paranoid psychosis that gives the movie its erratic form. A definitive work of claustrophobic horror, Repulsion offers some of Polanski’s most famous, insidious images: an uncooked rabbit left to rot, molesting arms protruding from the apartment walls, a split second apparition in a mirror. At the time, the film seemed a bravura Hitchcock riff; it’s clear by now that its blend of alarming surrealism and dime ­store Freudian thinking deserves its own place in the pantheon.

Wed., Feb. 12, 1 p.m.; Thu., Feb. 13, 1 p.m., 2014