“I need to leave”: The movie too scary for Benny Safdie to continue watching
While all the focus might be on his brother right now, it’s important to remember that Benny Safdie is one cool dude.
Sure, The Smashing Machine didn’t go down nearly as well as Marty Supreme, but the younger sibling still played his part in the pair’s combined efforts. As both a filmmaker and an actor, Safdie has branched out into many fields with great success; however, there are still some frontiers he has yet to conquer.
Either as a pair or following their split, neither Safdie has made an honest-to-goodness horror film, and the closest they came was in 2014’s Heaven Knows What, a psychological drama about a group of homeless heroin addicts, but they’re clearly fans of the genre, as both Good Time and Uncut Gems are shot and edited in a frenetic style that wouldn’t look out of place in a tense slasher flick.
Josh and Benny confirmed the theory in a conversation with Criterion, where the former admitted to being a big fan of David Cronenberg, with Existenz, Scanners, and Videodrome ranking among his favourites, but the latter oddly picked Roman Polanski, and speaking about his love for him as a director and not a human being, Benny relayed a story about how one film caused him to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“There’s a moment in Repulsion where I remember watching it for the first time,” he said, “I stopped the movie, I got up and said, ‘OK, I need to leave and just experience life, and then I’ll come back to the film’. I couldn’t continue watching it. I was that scared, I’ve never had that happen.”
Released in 1965, Repulsion was the French-born Polanski’s first film made in the English language, which follows Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a quiet young woman living in London with her sister. When she leaves to go on vacation, Carol’s deep-seated fear of men spirals into full-on hallucinations of the most disturbing nature.
While not his most famous horror movie, Repulsion is widely considered to be one of Polanski’s greatest, claustrophobic, shocking, and entirely unpredictable triumphs, with some scholars even suggesting that it can be used to mark a decline in the culture of the swinging sixties.
Safide doesn’t specify which moment in the movie caused him to hit pause, and as anyone who has seen the movie will tell you, there are plenty of scenes it could have been. The true terror of Repulsion is that, while taking place inside the mind of a damaged woman, the events displayed on screen feel very real. Carol is afraid of men because of the genuine threats of physical and sexual violence they carry. Needless to say that these scenes take on an entire new, more skin-crawling meaning when viewed through the lens of Polanski’s personal actions.
He might be a truly monstrous individual who has never truly atoned for his reprehensible sins, but there’s no denying the impact that Polanski has had on cinema, especially horror. If Benny Safdie were to borrow some elements of Repulsion for his next project, be it horror or otherwise, then that would be no bad thing.
