So this is a Jess movie that I happened to walk in on during the opening credits, and stayed for. It’s a kind of psychological suspense thriller thing, but for extremely low values of “thrill,” because it’s a very leisurely-paced movie.

The basic premise is that a dude (played by the director, infamous rapist and fugitive from justice Roman Polanski) is renting an apartment, and the previous tenant had thrown herself off the balcony to her almost-death (she’s in the hospital). He moves into the place and yadda yadda throws himself off the balcony. Which I mean, like, you knew that was gonna happen from minute one, right? Right.

So it’s one of those movies that, at first, plays coy with whether all these awful people are doing genuinely terrible things or if it’s only in his mind, but eventually it becomes clear that yeah, it’s all in his mind, and he’s just becoming paranoid and hallucinatory. It doesn’t really do a dread-filled slow build or anything, though, it’s just like a bunch of weird off-kilter episodes.

Story-wise, there’s almost nothing that actually happens. As a personality study, it comes closer to working, but it’s too distant and cold to really quite come together (and then too, it really can’t quite decide if it wants to lean into psychological realism or leave the supernatural open — sort of like Rosemary’s Baby in that way). But I don’t know, it does have a kind of mood that it establishes effectively, and it’s visually distinctive enough to be interesting.

I can’t exactly recommend it — and of course, Polanski is a terrible human being, and refusing to watch it on those grounds alone is extremely reasonable — but there’s enough there that I don’t regret watching it.