Film Review: Rosemary’s Baby – 9/10

‘Witches… All of them witches…’

Of all the films I have watched for this year’s 31 Days of Night, only two can be said to be bona fide horror classics. One was The Evil Dead, and the other stands before you today as bold as Satan himself. Yes, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is a horror masterpiece, there are no two ways about it…

When young couple Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) Woodhouse move into a high rise apartment complex in New York City, everything seems to be going just swell (give or take rumblings about various murders and suicides that have taken place in the apartment building over the years). Guy’s career as an actor is taking off, the neighbours, Roman (Sidney Blackmer) and Minnie (Ruth Gordon) are helpful if a little overbearing, and they’ve even bagged themselves the best doctor (Ralph Bellamy) in the city to oversee Rosemary’s pregnancy. What could go wrong?

As the second film in Polanski’s loose Apartment Trilogy, Rosemary’s Baby is perhaps the one that most heavily leans into the isolation and loneliness inherent in apartment living. The concept that one can be surrounded by people and yet utterly alone. While the Polish director mostly chooses to dispense with the mystery element of the book (in which it is much less clear how much of what is being described is actually in Rosemary’s head), Polanski’s fifth feature film is a masterclass in tension building and suspense. This was my second or third viewing and yet I was glued to the screen for the entire two hour and 15 minute running time. This is partly down to the dark power of the story itself, expertly adapted to the screen from Ira Levin’s outstanding novel, and partly because Rosemary’s Baby questions attitudes to woman, religion and modern living in a way that only serves to embellish the foreboding sense of dread that permeates the whole film. This is a testament to Polanski’s skill as a filmmaker.

As a good Catholic boy, I am particularly susceptible to films about fallen angels and witchcraft, but you don’t have to be religious to be shocked and appalled by Rosemary’s Baby. A nasty, soul-destroying film that deserves its place among the pantheon of horror greats.