Knife in the Water

Roman Polanski's debut feature, Knife in the Water (1962), is one of the most assured first films in cinema history, and the only feature Polanski made in his native Poland before leaving for the West. It earned an Academy Award nomination, Poland's first in the foreign-language category, and even put its young director on the cover of Time.

The whole drama plays out among three people on a small sailing boat: a smug, successful husband, his quieter wife, and the cocky young hitchhiker they take aboard. Polanski wrings extraordinary tension from the confinement. The men's jockeying for dominance is charged with class resentment and sexual threat, and the knife of the title hums underneath it all as a constant, low-level danger. Krzysztof Komeda's cool jazz score adds to the unease.

Claustrophobia, psychological menace, the malice beneath civilised surfaces: the film laid down the themes Polanski would go on to explore in Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. The Communist authorities famously disliked its lack of a social message, which only helped its reputation in the West. Lean, taut and vicious, Knife in the Water is still a model of how much suspense three people and a boat can generate. Komeda's score and Polanski's control of space announced two talents who would shape world cinema for the next half-century. Watch it beside Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby and the line is plain: the same tight spaces, the same menace under good manners, the same mastery of three-character tension.