A Complex Scare

Rating: 8/10 (20 January 2008)

Understanding that the horror is internalized within the story itself and expressed through the mundaneness of the actors' expressions, I was not successfully horrified, yet I was successfully enthralled. I found the villainy and situations to be tense and even irksome, which is a word one doesn't often use when referring to a reaction to a film. The film's later revelations are not necessarily scary but alternately intense and almost humorous, almost like a Charlie Kaufman script.
Whatever the intentions of the film, whether to be a horror film, an off-putting blend of genres and techniques, or a thriller, it has an effect above that of many of the scariest horror movies, not because it's a more consuming effect that being genuinely scared in the way that Psycho or Saw scare, but because it's an effect that is more complex, thus more complex to achieve. At first, I was put off by the scale of the film-making, which expresses its big budget, large cinematographic scope, and less of an insular or atmospheric environment one would imagine being necessary to be successfully creepy. Now I can see that it was all a part of Polanski's vision.