'Ah! Pinter' one cries, sniffing like a Bisto Kid at the heady aroma of Cul-de-Sac…. Then one remembers the odd, elliptical conversations of Knife in the Water, and wonders if Polanski was even then the Pinter of Poland. An unanswerable question, really, even if one knows Polish, as Pinter's English is so distinctive that it sounds like something else as soon as it is translated. Whatever the answer, the fact remains that Polanski's command of the English language has matured rapidly since the hesitancies of Repulsion, and the idiotic clichés of polite conversation, observed with hilarious exactness, form a permanent, twittering background to Cul-de-Sac.

For the rest, this is very much Polanski as we have come to know him: ghoulish black comedy; the pain of solitude; pride; a touch of masochism; and above all, people and objects at odds with a landscape (like the bandaged men against...