‘Dreams don’t always come true…’
In the 2000s, remakes were all the rage in the horror subgenre with Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street all receiving the remake treatment. They have since fallen out of favour to make way for the reboot – a film that serves as a soft remake whilst also containing a narrative thread that links it to the source material. Apartment 7A is officially a prequel to Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby but for all intents and purposes it is a remake…
Julia Garner plays what is essentially the Mia Farrow role, with Dianne West stepping in for the inimitable Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet. There are some small plot tweaks. Garner’s character Terry is an aspiring dancer rather than the wife of an aspiring actor. Other than that, all the major plot points from Rosemary’s Baby are present and correct. Hallucinations. Demon sex. A creepy doctor. The tannis root necklace. This really is just a blow-by-blow redux of what is a far superior film. Apartment 7A isn’t a bad film. It’s competently directed by Natalie Erika James and Garner is excellent in the lead role, but it compares unfavourably to the source material and also to The First Omen, another 2024 film about a cursed child with a similar narrative conceit which turned out far better than this film does.
Apartment 7A is the kind of film that passes the time just fine (although it is 10 minutes too long) but leaves no lasting impression whatsoever. The main emotion it inspired in me was a longing to be watching Rosemary’s Baby instead. In this world of IP as king, any intellectual property is ripe for mining but everything about the tragic protagonist here was suitably explained in a few lines of expository dialogue in the original movie. Indeed, Apartment 7A genuinely has no reason to exist, not in its finished form anyway. A movie in this universe could have worked had they moved away from Rosemary’s Baby even just a little bit.
Everyone involved appears to have tried their best but this film will have been forgotten by the time the Christmas decorations go up. Seriously, just rewatch Rosemary’s Baby instead.
