Upon staying alone at the flat, Collin, a young beautiful woman, works as a makeup artist in a well-known beauty center and lives with her older sister in the same flat, who goes in a trip with her lover, leaving her sister alone, struggles against overthinking that leads her to 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.
Quickflix
October 21, 2014
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.
