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 short story The Room. (p. 18)

Cul-de-Sac is a case of style transcending subject: indeed, if the film is so difficult to write about … it's because so much of it is a meditation in the odd visual details through which Polanski keeps turning the everyday into a sort of fantasy-land—eg, the simple act of drinking is imbued with sinister overtones because the camera-angle stresses the muscles pulling away in the men's throats. The script concocts some brilliantly eccentric re-circuitings of the dramatic current—thus the suspense-making situation of friends and child calling for lunch with the gangster-dominated couple ends, not with a plea for rescue, but with hosts and friends venting all their long-pent-up hostility in one blazing row. In its construction the film has an inspired dottiness, as in the slow spiralling-down of the terror situation to a casual practical joke, which in its turn escalates through a sexually highly-charged situation to the final killings. (p. 51)

[It's] not just certain motifs (eggs, corpses, 'solidarity'), or the mad mood, that recalls Buñuel. What keeps his film lightweight, relatively, is the reliance on melodrama and parody; and Polanski may well match The Exterminating Angel (itself a title for Repulsion!) when he altogether dispenses with these ingredients and comes to trace the interweaving of madness and sanity, 'straight', in a world as unquivocally everyday as [Cesare] Zavattini's. (p. 52)