Have you ever felt a little too paranoid? Now, could this disturbance be at the fault of your own or could it have rather originated at the hands of everybody around you? Roman Polanski’s self-starred and self-directed follow-up to his critically acclaimed hit Chinatown is an absolute freak-show of home-cooked delusion; the analysis of how someone’s tragic story created another’s hopeless decay into what many would consider an identity crisis.
At The Tenant’s fault, however, the main character bumps into friends and some other individuals in the film that all come off as unbelievably cartoonish characters. Obviously, people like this could plausibly exist in real life, but at the excessive, unchanging rate as they are in this movie, it feels pretty phony in the midst of a movie that seems to want its subject matter to be taken seriously when bouncing back and forth from reality to fantasy.
To The Tenant’s benefit, nevertheless, it still managed to keep me curious and stumped until its conclusion despite its atmospherical issues. Polanski has something against apartments though, that’s for sure.
Verdict: B-
“The Tenant” is now available on YouTube, Google Play, Hulu, and Sling TV.
Burning the Celluloid 
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