These films, together with The Tenant, comprise what critics have called Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy, a triptych of persecution fantasies borne out in the transient, sharable space of the urban apartment. But we can also see these three films, along with Tess and Chinatown, as Polanski’s Women’s Films. While Polanski himself plays the male lead for The Tenant, when he comes to occupy an apartment—or it comes to occupy him—he comes to occupy the position of a woman, as though to be trapped and exposed the way Carol or Rosemary are is to become feminized.
