Cul-de-sac

Roman Polanski's second film in English is set on Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast. George, played by Donald Pleasence, lives in a castle with Teresa, his much younger French wife. When two wounded gangsters take refuge there, the expected hostage thriller never assembles. What starts instead is a power game in which four people humiliate, undermine and ridicule each other. Its best invention is that both the gangster and his hosts gradually forget what they were going to do. Dickie, played by Lionel Stander, is coarse and menacing, and the strangeness of the castle swallows him too. Teresa, played by Françoise Dorléac, treats the situation not as a crisis but as a cure for boredom. The island is cut off from the mainland twice a day by the tide, and the film converts that geographic fact directly into a prison. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1966. Who it is for: viewers who like black comedy and Polanski's enclosed-space tension. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a genre thriller, since the film keeps sliding into comedy and deliberately dismantles its own suspense.