Repulsion

• Shot on a modest budget of roughly £65,000, with the exteriors filmed in London's South Kensington and the Ledoux sisters' flat interiors built on a small stage at Twickenham Film Studios (not Shepperton).
• Catherine Deneuve was cast largely on the strength of her own youth and natural shyness, which matched Carol's age and withdrawn quality — by her own account, Polanski used her real reticence rather than directing a performance of it. Neither Polanski nor Deneuve spoke fluent English at the time, which made communication on set genuinely difficult rather than a deliberate creative choice.
• The hallucination sequences were built with practical, in-camera tricks: rubber arms were pushed through holes cut into the corridor walls to create the groping-hands effect, and the walls were rigged to crack and creak loudly on cue, giving the impression the apartment itself was warping around Carol.
• The film carried a UK X certificate on release and marked Polanski's first English-language feature. It premiered at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win both the FIPRESCI Prize and the Silver Berlin Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.
• The story was conceived jointly by Polanski and co-writer Gérard Brach, who worked out the outline together in Paris before Brach drafted the script.

The apartment doesn't hallucinate Carol—Carol hallucinates the apartment. Every crack, groping hand, and stretching corridor maps onto a specific repressed memory of sexual violence, possibly by a family member. The final photograph of young Carol staring in terror at male hands suggests the origin point was childhood, not adulthood.

Carol's sister Helen is not actually absent for much of the film. Helen's departure is real, but the phone calls Carol answers, the footsteps she hears, and the food left out are evidence that Helen returns periodically and Carol's fractured perception simply edits her out—Carol is alone only in her mind, not in fact.

The rabbit is the film's silent narrator. Purchased as food, never cooked, left to rot in stages that mirror Carol's decay, the rabbit functions as a deliberate sacrificial object—Carol identifies with its passivity, its confinement, and its slow dissolution into the apartment's oppressive atmosphere.

Carol Ledoux lives in a London flat with her sister, drifting through days in a fugue of silence and flinching at every man who breathes near her. When sis leaves for Italy, Carol's cracks widen fast. Walls split open. Hands grope from corridors. A rabbit carcass rots on the counter while she wastes away inside locked doors. Polanski builds her breakdown from the architecture itself—corridors stretch, rooms breathe, the apartment becomes her skull turned inside out. By the time anyone breaks through, she's already gone, frozen in a final frame that says everything and nothing.