Knife in the Water
Directed by Roman Polanski
Poland, 1962
Certainly a stretch to categorize as horror, Roman Polanski’s debut feature anticipates the creeping dread and tense blocking that will characterize his later, truer films of the genre.
Husband and wife Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) pick up a young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) on their way to a sailing outing. The young man joins them on the water and tensions rise among the three as the men jockey for power.
Coming after a number of murky, eerie shorts – including 1957’s grim A Murder – Knife in Water is Lifeboat meets Dead Calm but with Polanski’s signature brooding unease rather than overt, textbook suspense or violence. Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant make up the director’s “Apartment Trilogy,” and though Knife in Water is almost exclusively on open water it may as well mark the beginning of a “Claustrophobia Quadrilogy.
Directed by Roman Polanski
Poland, 1962
Certainly a stretch to categorize as horror, Roman Polanski’s debut feature anticipates the creeping dread and tense blocking that will characterize his later, truer films of the genre.
Husband and wife Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) pick up a young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) on their way to a sailing outing. The young man joins them on the water and tensions rise among the three as the men jockey for power.
Coming after a number of murky, eerie shorts – including 1957’s grim A Murder – Knife in Water is Lifeboat meets Dead Calm but with Polanski’s signature brooding unease rather than overt, textbook suspense or violence. Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant make up the director’s “Apartment Trilogy,” and though Knife in Water is almost exclusively on open water it may as well mark the beginning of a “Claustrophobia Quadrilogy.
- 10/14/2014
- by Neal Dhand
- SoundOnSight
TorontoFilm.Net reports that the Tiff Bell Lightbox run of director Roman Polanski's "Carnage", opens Friday December 30, 2011.
Tiff will also host a retrospective looking back at specific films during Polanski's career, tracing the recurring themes that have shaped his vision.
"Roman Polanski" runs December 17 - December 25, 2011, including special screenings of the features "Knife in the Water", "Cul-de-sac", "Chinatown", "Repulsion", "The Tenant", "Rosemary's Baby", and "The Ghost Writer" :
"...In a career spanning more than fifty years, Roman Polanski has firmly established himself as one of the contemporary masters of cinema with his nerve-wrackingly suspenseful and darkly comic portraits of cruelty, violence, claustrophobia and madness.
"Often confining his characters within suffocatingly cloistered locations—a sailboat on a lonely lake, a crumbling castle, an isolated beach house and a succession of ominous apartment houses—Polanski observes with cynical, diabolical glee as the thin pretenses of civilization are quickly stripped away in the face of human vanities,...
Tiff will also host a retrospective looking back at specific films during Polanski's career, tracing the recurring themes that have shaped his vision.
"Roman Polanski" runs December 17 - December 25, 2011, including special screenings of the features "Knife in the Water", "Cul-de-sac", "Chinatown", "Repulsion", "The Tenant", "Rosemary's Baby", and "The Ghost Writer" :
"...In a career spanning more than fifty years, Roman Polanski has firmly established himself as one of the contemporary masters of cinema with his nerve-wrackingly suspenseful and darkly comic portraits of cruelty, violence, claustrophobia and madness.
"Often confining his characters within suffocatingly cloistered locations—a sailboat on a lonely lake, a crumbling castle, an isolated beach house and a succession of ominous apartment houses—Polanski observes with cynical, diabolical glee as the thin pretenses of civilization are quickly stripped away in the face of human vanities,...
- 12/6/2011
- by Michael Stevens
- SneakPeek
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