Do you have a video playback issues?
Please disable AdBlocker in your browser for our website.
Due to a high volume of active users and service overload, we had to decrease the quality of video streaming. Premium users remains with the highest video quality available. Sorry for the inconvinience it may cause. Donate to keep project running.
A Belgian girl, Carol, works as a manicurist at a London beauty salon. She shares a flat with her sister Helen. While Helen and Michael, her boyfriend, leave on a vacation to Pisa, Italy, Carol chooses largely to lock herself in the apartment, ditching work. Left alone in their flat, Carol';;s moments of catalepsy and hallucination increase and deepen into madness.
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.
At second glance, or as often as a moviegoer can bear to peek through his knotted fingers, it is a Gothic horror story, a classic chiller of the Psycho school and approximately twice as persuasive.
Still perhaps Polanski's most perfectly realised film, a stunning portrait of the disintegration, mental and emotional, of a shy young Belgian girl (Deneuve) living in London.
The ordeal we and Polanski craved for Deneuve turned out to be just a sport, and we were the ball -- just as we'd hoped.
April 11, 2006
Quickflix
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.