One of the more amazing things about returning to Rosemary’s Baby after its release decades ago, or even watching it for the first time since one’s teenage years, is how little it telegraphs itself as a horror movie. It’s not simply that it’s a slow-burn horror film; rather, it simply isn’t a horror film, at least not for the first two acts, which both belies and affirms its status as one of the creepiest films ever made. Instead, the first two acts present an uncomfortable drama of Mia Farrow’s loss of autonomy as she makes excuses for her husband’s slowly burgeoning career and puts on airs for both friends and her distressingly-friendly new neighbors. It’s only because of the building of this otherwise humdrum domestic drama, combined with the additional anxiety of doing everything she can to play the good mother-to-be, that the horrific rug-pulling of its climax works so well. Apartment 7A, a prequel to Roman Polanski’s film made 50 years later, makes the mistake of imitating every beat of the original with the patience and grace expected from today’s IP-slinging content-production machines.
The title bizarrely assumes a lively Rosemary’s Baby fandom that would instantly recognize the apartment number of an ancillary character, Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner). This film follows Terry as she, paralleling John Cassavetes’ Broadway ambitions in the original film, tries for a dance career in New York City, attending audition after audition with little success and a very broken ankle. Her roommates in the Village seem to despise her, and she’s once again late on rent. But, by some unholy kismet, Terry is found and taken into the Branford Building (again played by the legendary Dakota) by the aggressively nice Castevets, Minnie (Dianne Wiest, pulling off a perfect Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Kevin McNally), after losing consciousness outside. They offer her their spare apartment rent-free, reveal that they know the theater producer Alan (Jim Sturgess) whom she had stalked to the Branford in the first place, and proffer a life-changing meeting with him. While life-changing meetings happen to New Yorkers in the arts every day, the free gigantic co-op apartment should announce to any self-respecting New Yorker that this is indeed too good to be true.
The rest of the film follows the plot of Rosemary’s Baby almost exactly. This sometimes works well because Rosemary’s Baby is a good movie; this is predictably bad when one remembers the existence of Rosemary’s Baby, a much better movie. Very few surprises await: the Castevets are emissaries of Satan, they seek to to impregnate Terry with Satan’s child, and the only person to whom she can turn for protection is in on it. Not only does this film follow the same broad outline as its predecessor, but exact sequences are often copied nearly beat-for-beat. Dr. Sapirstein (Patrick Lyster) plays the same role for the cabal by downplaying Terry’s obvious medical problems and giving her a familiar-looking herbal remedy that she is to wear around her neck. She even, like Rosemary, cuts her hair short — an extremely odd event to mirror in this film as it seems to imply there’s something consistently Satanic about a pixie cut.
But a majority of the homages are calculated so as to not feel entirely like a cheap imitation or unfinished sketch. In place of Mia Farrow’s nightmare insemination sequence, Terry is granted a dreamlike dance sequence, complete with an Expressionist version of the Branford casting shadows on stage. Satan himself is shown — here in a bedazzled bodysuit and theater-kid demeanor that wouldn’t be out of place on RuPaul’s runway. These are fun choices, sure, but it’s clear that they’re mere variations of the scenes and characters that didn’t need improving, reimagining, or updating.
That said, whereas the original film kept Rosemary isolated in her apartment as a stay-at-home-mom-to-be and kept her husband’s ventures outside a mystery, Apartment 7A does travel into the streets of New York and the musical theater scene quite often. Terry is more of a “modern” woman than Rosemary as she’s younger and proud to chase a career. She also tries to abort the Satan spawn in a back-alley of Chinatown, a necessary update to the story given the 50 years of political conversations around abortion since Rosemary’s Baby, and an interesting update given that both movies are explicitly about women unable to claim autonomy over her body. It’s the one real update that works as it bears its politics proudly without the damper of a lecture, and it even includes a charmingly delirious scene of the Antichrist fighting off the doctor from inside the womb.
Director Natalie Erika James thankfully works with a visual language distinct from the original film, but one that often comes across as cheaper and safer, befitting a straight-to-streamer release. Nearly every shot is a shallow-focus medium-shot of a singular character, the streets chosen to represent New York City are nauseatingly generic, and it’s clear that, unlike Rosemary’s Baby, nothing was shot inside the haunted Dakota. Compare this to the original where wide-angle long-shots inside the building allow the characters to perform a complicated dance of social rituals all the while demonstrating, by showing the depth and opulence of merely the apartment space, just how mysteriously old-money the Castevets are. Here, the Castevets’ apartment is shown with tracking shots down narrow hallways and a parlor that looks more fitting for a third-year Goldman Sachs quant in Kips Bay than an ancient power that has taken root in the heart of America’s empire (though, admittedly, it’s fair to see where one might confuse the two). While copycat behavior is nearly demanded in the contracts of IP-laden productions, this architectural abuse is the unforgivable sin in a movie with “apartment” in its title. The original Rosemary’s Baby presented a version of the Dakota so menacing that it has forever haunted the actual building; Apartment 7A’s only power rests in reminding the audience that renting in NYC is unpleasant.
DIRECTOR: Natalie Erika James; CAST: Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Jim Sturgess, Kevin R. McNally; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount+; STREAMING: September 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
