Is “Repulsion” a Roman Polanski film, or a Catherine Deneuve film? The notorious director’s skin-crawling English-language debut is unmistakably the work of the mind behind “Rosemary’s Baby.” Yet the human screen that this uncanny psychological horror film depends on is Ms. Deneuve’s famous blank-mask face-beauty made strange.

Their tale of a terrified (and terrifying) woman going mad opens at Film Forum in a newly restored print that lays bare every last crack in her crumbling world and psyche. Ms. Deneuve plays Carole Ledoux, a young Frenchwoman in London living with (and clinging to) her older sister. Polanski is Polanski, mapping the grotesque weave of Freudian nightmare.

Carole acts like what now might be called a real space cadet, because she’s beset by what were then called hangups. King-size ones. On the way to work at a beauty shop or cooped up in the flat that becomes her hermit rathole, the world seethes with the sinister come-ons of sexuality: a cat-calling construction worker, an overeager suitor, and even her own sister, audible through the wall in orgasmic abandon with her lover.

This is all more than Carole can cope with, even before her sister goes off on vacation with a leering Brit boyfriend (“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” he joshes). An infamous expressionistic crack-up ensues (hands appearing out of walls, sweaty men materializing in her bed), but Polanski gets across Carole’s psychological cul-de-sac early on with a single image. She gazes from her window upon a courtyard where nuns play schoolyard ball games and shriek with joy – a vision of totally asexual pleasure.

Creeping along, “Repulsion” amasses a whole psychological rebus of images and sounds like this: a screen-wide shot of Carole’s eyeball opens the film, and later she absently leaves out a skinned, uncooked rabbit carcass for days in the living room. A clock ticks mercilessly throughout and again during an apparent assault. Raw, exposed, and primed to snap – we gradually come to be as tense as Carole, with the drawn-out dead stretches and close-ups of cracks that pop open in the walls.

Ms. Deneuve came to this funhouse of creepy surfaces from another world of artifice, Jacques Demy’s musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” Here she hides her mannequin-like face under bangs, as if in disguise. The look takes away her usual cool patrician bearing to make her a fearful cipher, wishing to be anywhere but where she is. She gives Carole an unresponsiveness in scenes with other characters that is pitiful and scary at the same time.

It’s quite a head-trip from the naif of “Umbrellas” to this one, which brings up a mildly macabre joke at the heart of “Repulsion.” There’s a smidgen of unseemly male satisfaction in the glacial, innocent beauty who never returns a guy’s phone calls turning out to be a closet psycho.Meanwhile,the poor bastard of a pickup artist (Ian Hendry) who’s interested in her gets idiotic counsel from his boorish pub pals: What should he do next? It’s a Polanski date movie.

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