The Tenant: A Deep Dive into the Identity Concept
Written by Kerem Müldür
“Tell me, at what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?”
The Cambridge Dictionary defines identity as a person's name and other facts about who they are. Even though identity is shaped by our actions and thoughts, it also affects us. Sometimes, our identity, the very phenomenon that defines ourselves, is decided by factors that aren’t in our control. This problem might lead us to existential questioning and even mental illnesses. That is why the concept is a very common topic of discussion in the art world. In this article, The Tenant (1976) by Roman Polanski is utilized to explain the identity concept more deeply and argue what defines it.
Our protagonist, Trelkovsky, moves to Paris and looks for a flat to rent. He is introduced to the flat by the janitor woman, who behaves hostilely from the moment she sees Trelkovsky. While showing him around the house, the janitor tells Trelkovsky that the former tenant, named Simone Choule, has committed suicide and shows him the glass broken by her fall. Then she tells her Simone is not dead yet.
After discussing the terms with the owner of the building, Monsieur Zy, Trelkovsky visits Simone Choule in the hospital, finding her in a coma. Then Simone’s friend Stella comes to visit her too, but as Simone sees Stella, she starts to scream, and they get out of the hospital. After that point, Trelkovsky starts to acquire Simone’s habits, her appearance, and finally her fate.
It is obvious that Trelkovsky doesn’t have a very strong identity: he can’t dominate his neighbours and always apologizes even if he is not guilty. Secondly, he is a newcomer to Paris from Poland. Therefore, even if he is a citizen, he feels unsafe speaking out about his neighbours or the thieves that robbed his home. These happenings imply that Trelkovsky has an unstable identity even before he starts to transform into Simone Choule.
As Trelkovsky settles into his new apartment, the first sign of being treated as an outsider is the noise complaints. Starting from the night when Trelkovsky had his friends over to celebrate his new home, he always hears noise complaints and is threatened by Monsieur Zy. Multiple times about this issue. On top of that, his neighbours watch his house from the window directly for more than 10 minutes when they are in the toilet, leading him to feel judged.
Trelkovsky’s transformation into Simone begins not with his body, but with small habits that seem meaningless at first. At the café, he learns that Simone used to drink chocolate and smoke Marlboro cigarettes, and he gradually starts doing the same. He also becomes connected to Stella, one of Simone’s friends, which further pulls him into the social space Simone once occupied. The most disturbing symbol is the tooth he finds hidden inside the wall of the apartment. Instead of throwing it away, Trelkovsky eventually places one of his own teeth there as well. At this point, Simone is no longer only the previous tenant of the apartment. Trelkovsky starts repeating her routines, making him question the line between his identity and Simone’s.
The transformation becomes more visible when Trelkovsky starts adopting Simone’s appearance. He buys a wig, wears her clothes, paints his nails, applies lipstick, and looks at himself in the mirror as if he is testing a new version of his identity. What makes these scenes important is that he does not simply dress like Simone for pleasure or imitation. His appearance becomes evidence that the boundary between Trelkovsky and Simone is collapsing. When he looks into the mirror and says, “I think I’m pregnant,” the statement can be understood symbolically: he is “pregnant” with a new persona. Simone is no longer something outside him that he copies. Her identity has begun to grow inside his own, while the original Trelkovsky becomes increasingly difficult to locate.
The final stage of the transformation is not only becoming Simone, but repeating her fate. One night, Trelkovsky looks toward the bathroom across the courtyard and sees himself standing there. Until this point, he has felt watched and judged by his neighbours; now he becomes his own observer, as if he must look at himself from outside to understand who he is. When he later sees Simone in the bathroom, the distinction becomes even weaker: the figure watching Trelkovsky has effectively become Simone. His hallucinations continue when he sees the disabled girl wearing a Trelkovsky mask. His old identity now appears to have moved into another body, while his own body belongs increasingly to Simone. After even Stella’s apartment becomes unsafe in his mind, he returns home and repeats Simone’s fall. The circular ending finally places us inside the hospital scene from the beginning, suggesting that Trelkovsky has not merely imitated Simone but has entered the same identity and the same fate.
Let us return to the question Trelkovsky asks in Stella’s bed: if his head were separated from his body, would he say “me and my body”? What gives his head the right to represent the “me” in the first place? By the end of the film, this question is no longer philosophical speculation. Trelkovsky has adopted Simone’s habits, appearance, relationships, and finally her fate. His body still physically belongs to Trelkovsky, yet almost every external sign through which he recognizes himself has been replaced. The film therefore questions whether identity can really be located in the body alone. If habits can be copied, appearances changed, and social roles transferred from one person to another, then the self becomes much harder to define.
Trelkovsky also seems to construct his personality according to the roles other people give him. When Stella approaches him romantically, he accepts that role. When his neighbours demand silence, he obeys. When the apartment begins to treat him as an outsider, he gradually starts seeing himself as one. This creates an important parallel with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa remains mentally conscious after his physical transformation, yet his family increasingly stops recognizing him as the person he once was. His internal sense of self survives longer than his social identity. In The Tenant, Polanski reverses this process: Trelkovsky’s body initially remains unchanged, while the gaze and expectations of others begin reshaping the way he understands himself.
However, blaming the neighbours completely would make the film too simple. Polanski never confirms that the conspiracy Trelkovsky imagines actually exists. Some of the neighbours are genuinely hostile, but many of the later events are clearly distorted by his paranoia and hallucinations. This ambiguity creates a Freudian sense of the uncanny: the apartment, the body, the mirror, and even Trelkovsky’s own face are familiar things that gradually become foreign to him. The horror therefore may not come from society destroying a stable identity, but from Trelkovsky discovering that his identity was never as stable as he believed.
This raises a larger question: what actually defines a person? The body cannot be the complete answer, because Trelkovsky’s body remains his while his identity changes. Habits cannot be enough, because habits can be learned and repeated. Appearance can be altered, and social identity depends partly on how others recognize us. Even memory is unreliable when the mind itself begins to collapse. Perhaps identity is not one permanent object hidden somewhere inside us, but a fragile combination of our body, memories, behaviour, relationships, and the way we are seen by others.
This is why the title The Tenant becomes especially meaningful. Trelkovsky is literally the tenant of an apartment previously occupied by Simone, but he increasingly appears to become a tenant of an identity previously occupied by her as well. Simone leaves traces behind; Trelkovsky enters them, inhabits them, and eventually repeats them. By the final hospital scene, it becomes impossible to determine where Simone ends, and Trelkovsky begins. The film therefore leaves us with the same question with which it began: at what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is? Polanski never gives us an answer. Perhaps the disturbing possibility is that there is no precise moment, because there may never have been a single, permanent self to lose.
References:
Hall, M. R. (2017). Roman Polanski’s treatment of mutable identity in his film, The Tenant (1976). Cogent Social Sciences, 3(1), Article 1299554. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2017.1299554
Tombul, I. (2025). Palimpsest of unheimlich in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976). SineFilozofi, 19, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.31122/sinefilozofi.1475618
Boz, M. (2025). ‘Olmak ya da olmamak’: Roman Polanski’nin Kiracı filminde benlik ve ötekilik sorunu [‘To be or not to be’: The problem of self and otherness in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant]. Yedi: Sanat, Tasarım ve Bilim Dergisi, 33, 177–191. https://doi.org/10.17484/yedi.1511206
Olson, E. T. (2023). Personal identity. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The StanfordEncyclopediaa of Philosophy (Fall 2024 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/identity-personal/
Minar, K. S., & Sutandio, A. (2017). Shame and alienation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Poetika: Jurnal Ilmu Sastra, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.22146/poetika.v5i2.27100
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