was I the only 1 who thought the noise was in her head?
This movie definitely made me think of a previous Roman Polanski film, but it was Repulsion, not The Tenant, that came to mind.
The main character Joyce reminded me of Catherine Deneuve's character in Repulsion. A young, beautiful woman, who is so fragile on the inside that when she finds herself living alone in an apartment for the first time in her life, she completely breaks down mentally, to the point that she hurts herself and others.
The film is very smart in that it first puts the viewer on the side of Joyce and we think the neighbor upstairs Ally Sheedy is the crazy old bat. But halfway through the movie, Joyce's increasingly irrational behavior (like her breakdown at the women's meeting, her sexual escapades with male strangers she openly despises, or the fact that she pretends she did not have an abortion but lost her baby in a miscarriage) made me think she is the one who is deranged. I think she was imagining the noise and making believe that the neighbor upsatirs is pitted against her. She starts becoming paranoid, thinking that her boss is an old friend of her neighbor, that pedestrians are offering her tips on how to off the neighbor, that her neighbor has become the subject of conversation at New York cocktail parties etc. Her drinking problem makes things worse and ultimately, she gets away with murder.