Joachim Jelle’s review published on Letterboxd:
With a notoriously tough production in which the ever-changing weather conditions, the distinctly egotistical actors, and a short seven-week shoot momentarily made the secluded castle a hell on Earth, Polanski’s Cul-de-sac may just have been a film reflecting its own inception.
In a vacant part of England, two injured, idiosyncratic gangsters wound up by a beachfront castle where the tide cuts off all ways of exit. By the force of nature, these four already peculiar characters are trapped on this isolated island with eggs and chickens en masse and enough home-brewed vodka to kill even the mountainous Lionel Stander. It is an invasion of privacy often portrayed in other Polanski pictures.
Attempting to grasp the tone and genre of the film may adequately be described as choking a living fish with one hand. Just when you think you have it, it wiggles its way out. Cul-de-sac is a thriller, a drama, and a comedy – sometimes all at once, sometimes not at all. And the effect is clear. We struggle to find certainty, we want to know what is happening, and we want to get the hell away. It’s a cabin-fever film, for the character as much as the audience.
The beast of a man that is Stander storms the castle leaving Donald Pleasance’s George as the defender of his kingdom and his wife Teresa, played confidently by Françoise Dorléac. She is unfathomably bored of or disinterested with her meek husband who seems as useless as the cooing chickens walking around the castle. Much of the comedy is found in the emasculation of George, but more importantly, much of the symbolic resonance, too, is derived from his character. However, the exciting ending is either purposefully ambiguous or a denouncement of the two extremes of masculinity.
Shot on location in beautiful black-and-white cinematography, Gilbert Taylor really had his work cut out for him, but it did pave the way for one of the best one-takes in cinema history, and it is definitely in the top four one-takes on beaches, preceding Cuarón’s obsession with the setting.