Polanski's first English-language film is a study of madness born of repression born of alienation. Indifference surrounds and finally invades Catherine Deneuve's London manicurist, whose virginal mien and doll-like features mask a morbid fascination with men. One weekend, left alone in the apartment she shares with her older (sexually active) sister, her world of dark fantasy runs hallucinatorily real. By Sunday night the apartment is strewn with bloody bodies. Polanski laces pity with terror, terror with humor, much of it at our expense. But there is method to his Grand Guignol: throughout, he makes us more afraid for than of the scary woman. "What Polanski counts on," Andrew Sarris writes, "is the fact that we all fear society's invasion of our subconscious, and that we will somehow identify with the most perverted privacy rather than blow the whistle for the authorities."