CRAWL WAITING Deneuve wishes she had an answering machine.

This early Polanski effort is poised precariously between tense psychological thriller and European art film, as if Hitchcock had spent a few weeks collaborating with Ingmar Bergman, with visits from Michelangelo Antonioni as an adviser on mod ’60s wardrobe and female sexuality. We’re not sure if it is a good film, but it’s an absolute trip to watch.Deneuve, looking like a life-size china doll, plays Carol, a young French woman living with her sister (Furneaux) in a London flat. Carol’s impassive stare and her habit of twitchily brushing imagined dirt off her nose signal from the get-go that she isn’t exactly the picture of mental health. But when her sister goes away for a vacation trip with a married man (Hendry), Carol rapidly goes from a bit off to full-blown nuts. Polanski, who collaborated on the script, lards the film with psychosexual symbolism: Carol can’t tolerate the presence of her sister’s beau’s straight razor in the bathroom, there is a convent just next door, a newspaper story recounts someone finding eels coming up out of the drain (paging Doctor Freud…). If you took all this hokum seriously, you’d almost have to laugh at the obviousness.

But that seems to be part of Polanski’s game. The film is so overloaded with dime-store psychology that you can’t take it at face value. The trouble is, once you get that joke, it’s unclear what you are meant to do next. (Opens Fri; Gene Siskel Film Center.)—HS