This is a very difficult movie, and it's almost impossible to get a handle on what's going on. At first it seems to be a rather pedestrian movie about a guy (Trelkovsky) who needs an apartment and rather crassly invites himself into one when the current tenant (a woman) commits suicide. Then the twists and turns start. Are the neighbors trying to kill him? And why are the dead tenant's clothes turning up in the apartment? One wonders, finally, if Trelkovksy _is_ the prior tenant.

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One of the tricks Polanski pulls on us is to lie to us. We assume when we see things from the point of view of a character that we see things as the character does and that there may be distortions of reality. We assume when the camera is showing us things from its omniscient point of view that we see actuality - but Polanski has the camera lie to us.