When Carol, a shy young Belgian, is left alone for a few days in the Kensington flat she shares with her sister, she begins to withdraw into a reclusive existence where innocuous everyday realities are distorted by deep-seated anxieties. On screen throughout the film, Deneuve gives a wondrously subtle performance as the increasingly catatonic girl, but equally expressive of her terrifying inner torment are the sometimes surreal but never over-emphatic visual and aural effects created by Polanski to accompany her wanderings around the empty apartment or the bustling streets of South Kensington.