Matt Brunson Film Frenzy Oct 29, 2024 3/4

The real focus is on detailing how the callous treatment of Carol by practically everyone around her only further serves to denigrate her standing as a “real” person rather than just a desirable beauty.

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Diana Tuova Spotlight on Film Aug 2, 2024 5/5

Led by Deneuve’s committed performance, Repulsion is an innovative, atmospheric and effective psychological horror, which is clever in a way it uses its entire low budget cinematic arsenal to induce one particular sense of apprehension and dread.

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Jorge Loser Espinof May 29, 2024 5/5

... A subjective portrait of mental illness that has become almost a manual to describe psychological breakdowns, especially the dimension of trauma and female repression. [Full review in Spanish]

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Tim Dirks Filmsite Nov 3, 2023

Co-writer/director Roman Polanski's disturbing, tense, frightening horror-psychological thriller was about the mental deterioration into schizophrenia of beautiful, timid, vulnerable and paranoid young 18 year-old blonde manicurist Carol Ledoux

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Howard Waldstein CBR Jun 27, 2023

Repulsion is often imitated, but never repeated, and few horror films have a similar walls-closing-in feeling that this one does. Deneuve also delivers a powerhouse performance, bearing the brunt of selling an incredible lean narrative of horror.

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Andrew Sarris Village Voice Jul 27, 2021

Repulsion is the scariest if not actually the goriest Grand Guignol since Psycho.

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Peter John Dyer Sight & Sound Mar 31, 2020

The rest of the film has that gurgling, soapy sound of muffed intentions going down the plug hole like bath water.

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Pauline Kael Vogue Feb 27, 2020

Were we supposed to have found it entertaining? There's more horror latent in this notion of the movie audience than in the film itself.

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Dwight MacDonald Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019

The purest exercise in homicidal mania yet made, and the most singleminded.

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Wendy Michener Maclean's Magazine Jun 27, 2019

Repulsion is far more shocking, in fact, than anything Hitchcock ever made, because it can produce in the spectator the added shock of self-recognition, the hallmark of a real artwork.

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MFB Critics Monthly Film Bulletin Mar 16, 2015

How much one remains held by all this probably depends on how much one is interested by the case-book aspect of Carol's story, but at least there are ample visual compensations.

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Simon Miraudo Quickflix Oct 21, 2014 4.5/5

The young Catherine Deneuve (she was 22 at the time of filming) gives a performance so unsettling and so precise, I can barely believe she grew into such a confident screen presence.

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Tom Hutchinson Radio Times Oct 6, 2013 5/5

Roman Polanski takes us on a deeply disturbing, hallucinatory trip into Catherine Deneuve's mental breakdown in this British psychological thriller,

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Philip French Observer (UK) Jan 5, 2013

Deneuve gives an astonishing, clinically accurate performance ...

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Derek Malcolm London Evening Standard Jan 4, 2013 4/5

Deneuve, as the woman whose fear of sexual contact is at the base of her neurosis, has seldom been less like her icy self.

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David Jenkins Little White Lies Jan 3, 2013 4/5

A film that expertly shows without ever telling, even while the symbolism is a mite heavy handed.

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Peter Bradshaw Guardian Jan 3, 2013 5/5

There can't be many other films which so plausibly show an entire, warped world created from a single point of view.

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Nicola Woodham Electric Sheep Jan 3, 2013

Polanski makes us psyche-cine intruders, able to come and go as we please. It is this that makes the film so unsettling and perversely enigmatic.

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Tim Robey Daily Telegraph (UK) Jan 3, 2013 3/5

It's been an inspiration ever since for films about claustrophobic hysteria, but not necessarily in a good way ...

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Andrew Lowry Total Film Dec 17, 2012 5/5

Filled with indelible images and punishing sound design, Repulsion casts a shadow over everything from Eraserhead to Black Swan, but there's nothing quite like the real thing.

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