4K UHD Review – The Tenant

After the critical and commercial success of 1974's "Chinatown," director Roman Polanski could've gone anywhere with his career. Such a triumph doesn't happen very often, but instead of pushing for a slightly bigger, or perhaps more complex endeavor, Polanski returns to the intimacy of madness in 1976's "The Tenant." It's an adaptation of a 1964 Roland Topor novel, handed the big screen treatment by Polanski and co-writer Gerard Brach, finding the helmer offering another addition to his "Apartment Trilogy" (joining "Rosemary's Baby" and "Repulsion"), bringing viewers back into tight physical spaces and suffocating areas of the mind. "The Tenant" is fairly small in scale, giving Polanski room to develop a certain character-based level of tension, eschewing grand sweeps of plot to remain tight on the main player and his game of possible insanity. It isn't the strongest effort from the filmmaker, who takes his time with the picture, and not always in a gripping manner. Polanski hopes to get under the skin during the offering, but such irritation only connects periodically in the overlong feature, though creepiness and interesting interpretational elements do contribute to the puzzle aspect of the material. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com