[4] The film stars Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Claude Dauphin and Shelley Winters.

Trelkovsky, a quiet and unassuming man, rents an apartment in Paris whose previous tenant, Egyptologist Simone Choule, attempted suicide by throwing herself out of the window and through a pane of glass below at 39 Rue de Calais.

Trelkovsky becomes severely agitated and enraged when his apartment is robbed, while his neighbors and the concierge continue to berate him for making too much noise, and his landlord warns him not to inform the police of the burglary.

He becomes hostile and paranoid in his day-to-day environment (snapping at his friends, slapping a child in a park) and his mental state progressively deteriorates.

He has visions of his neighbors playing football with a human head, finding the toilet covered in hieroglyphs, and looking across the courtyard, seeing himself standing at his apartment window, looking into the bathroom with binoculars.

Trelkovsky runs off to Stella for comfort and sleeps over, but in the morning after she has left for work, he concludes that she too is in on his neighbors' plot, and proceeds to vandalise and burgle her apartment before departing.

He is not injured too seriously, but receives a sedative injection from the doctor due to his odd behavior – he perceives the elderly couple as his landlord Zy and wife, and accuses them of trying to murder him.

A deranged Trelkovsky dresses up again as a woman and throws himself out of the apartment window in the manner of Simone Choule, before what he believes to be a clapping, cheering audience composed of his neighbors.

[7] Given its production design, photography, and the bizarre scenario of a group of neighbors that appear to be preying on a new tenant's life and conspiring against him for that purpose, it has also been compared to the black comedy film Delicatessen (1991).

[8][9] While the main character is clearly paranoid to some extent, the film does not entirely reveal whether everything takes place in his head or if the strange events happening around him exist at least partially, contrary to the previous entries in Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy".

[10][11][12] Many critics have noted The Tenant's strong Kafkaesque theme, typified by an atmosphere that is absurdly over-burdened with anxiety, confusion, guilt, bleak humour, alienation, sexual frustration and paranoia.

Minor infringements are treated as serious breaches of his tenancy agreement, and this apparent persecution escalates after he refuses to join his neighbours in a prejudiced campaign to oust a mother with a disabled child.

"The scheming plots over matters of extraordinary pettiness and inexplicable conspiracies that go on among the neighbours to gang up on others make The Tenant probably the first Kafkaesque horror film.

"[14] Critics have speculated[13] that the film's Kafkaesque atmosphere must be in part a reflection of Polanski's own Jewish experiences within a predominantly anti-Semitic environment.

In a disenchanted, jaded world with its fixed social order, the individual and one's autonomy have but one fate: Either submission and internalization of people's rules - or insanity.

Steve Biodrowski of Cinefantastique writes: "THE TENANT is short on typical horror movie action: there are no monsters, and there is little in the way of traditional suspense.

Does a (mysteriously) hostile environment drive him to commit suicide, or do the necessities of a cold reality break a tender soul?

"[22]Because of how little we get to know of Trelkovsky's life prior to his applying for the apartment and moving in, only to become an echo of former tenant Mademoiselle Choule because of his frail, almost inexistent personality's weak resistance to either her ghost or his bullying neighbors as if he has always been Mademoiselle Choule and always will be, the film has also been referred to as an early precursor to Fight Club (1999), a film where the final twist reveals it to be about a case of split personality.

As Brogan Morris writes in Flickering Myth: "One of Roman Polanski's recurring motifs has always been the horror of the apartment space.

It was as recently as his last film, Carnage, and in a crucial sequence of his masterful The Pianist: it's from an apartment window which Szpilman can do nothing but watch atrocities unfold outside.

You could extend the analogy further and compare Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant to Polanski's The Pianist, where Adrien Brody's protagonist, a Jew living in Poland under Nazi occupation, is reduced to hiding a pitiful, starving existence hiding in cubbyholes and the bombed-out ruins of buildings where he cannot be sure whether the people he encounters are friend or foe or will betray him.

Polanski himself grew up in the Krakow ghettos as a Jewish child under the Nazi occupation and survived by hiding in the countryside and with other families after his parents were taken to the concentration camps, so perhaps one can see the very personal nature of the recurrent themes of isolation, paranoia and the feeling that the apartment is an alien world in his work."

"[24] "In The Tenant, Roman Polanski explores again the psychic terrain of guilt, dread, paranoia, fears of sexual inadequacy and hysteria he made so familiar in Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, and Chinatown.

The slightly decadent and fetishistic, but innocent, bedtime games of Cul-de-sac have developed into the signs of a basic confusion concerning sexual identity.

By the time Clayton had delivered Gatsby to Paramount in March 1974, he had learned from Robert Evans that Polanski was interested in the project and wanted to play the lead role.

While Clayton was occupied preparing foreign language versions of Gatsby for the European market, Paramount studio head Barry Diller began negotiations with Polanski.