The affinities of this 'black comedy' [Cul-de-Sac] with the Theatre of the Absurd hardly need underlining; and there's a spirit not unlike Ionesco's in his playing with the conventions of the genre, something of Beckett in his final image of sobbing nihilism.

To make these comparisons is far from suggesting that his work is derivative. On the contrary…. [Polanski's] films bring a new impetus to a now inbred, cult-ridden, mood. For he remains in contact with certain positive enthusiasms: a robust, amiable Surrealism; a sense of the weight and strain and pain of everyday, realistic experiences; and a huge, mischievous enjoyment of the melodramas which he parodies…. Polanski's humour, like the Polish cinema, is profoundly existentialist. His studies of minds cracking might carry as subtitle the title of one of Sartre's novels, The Age of Reason; and their common theme, of slowly decomposing rationality, is adumbrated in Sartre's...