Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Pregnancy. It can be a blessing, a nightmare, or something in-between. Not that I can attest to the reality of the situation given that I'm a man, but living in a society where women are naturally expected to procreate and feel grateful for the opportunity to bring a unique, whole life into existence, I can only imagine the immense pressure and conflicted emotions faced by every woman as soon as they learn they're with child.

As if that wasn't terrifying enough, imagine being a young, expectant mother who just moved into a new apartment with your husband and realizing that your excessively friendly neighbors are part of a plot to get you impregnated by the Devil so that you can give birth to his only living son. Oh, and by the way, your own husband pimped you out to said Devil for the sake of advancing his career. 

A quick word of caution for any woman either trying to have a baby or already in the process, I would avoid watching Rosemary's Baby until after you've given birth lest your paranoia skyrocket to an irrational degree.

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse (Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes) are a happily married couple looking to begin the next chapter in their life in New York City. At the start of the film, Mia Farrow serenades us over the intro with the lullaby, "Sleep Safe and Warm", composed by Krzysztof Komeda, as William A. Fraker's camera pans slowly across a series of apartment buildings, allowing us to absorb the beauty and affluence of the city. Hovering above the Bramford, a large Renaissance Revival apartment, we see a bird's-eye view of the protagonists as they're led inside and given a tour by their overtly enthusiastic realtor, Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook). While showing his clients around the apartment, Mr. Nicklas divulges that the previous tenant, Mrs. Gardenia, recently passed away after mysteriously falling into a coma. She had been growing herbs that are still scattered throughout, and even more eyebrow-raising is the fact that she had moved a secretary desk in front of a linen closet. With some help from Guy, Nicklas removes the secretary and discovers the only thing she was apparently trying to hide was a vacuum cleaner. 

Ecstatic over the largeness of the apartment as well as the proximity to theaters for Guy, they decide to accept the Bramford as their permanent home. In celebration of the newly moved-in couple's new chapter, Edward Hutchins (Maurice Evans), a writer of boys' adventure stories, cooks them a lamb dinner and fills them in on the particularly dark history of their apartment: a pair of Victorian sisters named the Trenches cooked and ate children, including a niece, and Adrian Marcato, a devil worshipper, announced that he had conjured the living devil, and in response, the residents of Bramford attacked and nearly beat him to death.

In the laundry room, Rosemary meets a young Italian woman named Terry Gionoffrio (Angela Dorian, eating up her single scene with an endearing mix of gregariousness and world-weary cynicism), who's been living in the apartment across the hall from the Woodhouses with an elderly couple, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon). The Castevets had generously rescued Terry off the street from a life of drugs and homelessness. She has no family apart from a brother in the Navy, so the Castevets have become surrogate grandparents to her, treating her like the daughter they never had and gifting her with a good luck charm containing tannis root, a foreign herb with a foul odor. To avoid venturing into the dark, creepy laundry room by themselves, Rosemary and Terry make a deal to do their laundry together on a regular basis.

The following night, while on their way home from a walk, Rosemary and Guy notice an abundance of police officers and tenants gathered together outside the apartment, gazing at a horrid sight: Terry has committed suicide, having thrown herself from her apartment window. The good luck charm she had displayed to Rosemary is still wrapped around her neck. As a police officer tactlessly breaks the distressing news to Minnie and Roman, the former posits that Terry may have been cleaning the windows and fell, too distraught to believe she would take her own life. "She wasn't cleaning windows at midnight," Roman shrewdly insists. "Why not?" retorts Minnie, raising her voice. "Maybe she was!" Rosemary volunteers the gracious remarks Terry confided about the Castevets and expresses sympathy for their tragic loss. 

To communicate their gratitude and alleviate their grief over losing the closest thing they had to a child, Minnie invites Guy and Rosemary to their apartment the next night for a steak dinner, after which Roman has a private conversation with Guy in the living room while Rosemary assists Minnie with the dishes in the kitchen. While initially Guy was hesitant to enter into a relationship with their elderly neighbors, groaning, "We get friendly with an old couple like that, we'll never get rid of them. They're right across the wall," by the time they retire to their bedroom, he suddenly expresses an interest in going back the following night to hear more of Roman's fascinating stories.

Shortly after becoming closely acquainted with the Castevets, Guy receives a call that his competitor for a role in a highly publicized play, Donald Baumgart (Tony Curtis), has become blind, thus passing the career-elevating part to him by default. Feeling guilty that his work is preventing him from paying enough attention to his wife, Guy insists the two of them finally have a baby, even going so far as to map out the date at which they'll conceive.

Enjoying a romantic dinner, Guy and Rosemary are interrupted by a ring on their door. It's Minnie once again, who has come not to stay, but to offer two cups of her homemade chocolate mousse. While Guy seems to be enjoying his cup, devouring one mouthful of mousse after another, Rosemary begins to taste something not quite right with hers, a "chalky under-taste", as she refers to it. "Alright, don't eat it. There's always something wrong," Guy grumbles, effectively bullying Rosemary into forcing herself to eat more. In an ingenious act of subterfuge, Rosemary sends Guy to turn the record over, and once he walks away from the table, she quickly scoops a lot of the mousse onto the napkin on her lap. Unfortunately, the damage is already done. While transferring the hidden mousse into the trashcan, Rosemary becomes dizzy and collapses, so Guy carries her into the bedroom and rests her onto their bed, disrobing her to make her "more comfortable". 

As she closes her eyes and drifts off to sleep, Rosemary experiences a surreal nightmare: on a cruise ship, she is stripped naked and directed to go down below into a large, dark room illuminated by candles and adorned with religious paintings on the ceiling. Lying down flat on her back on a single mattress, a horde of her elderly neighbors, including Guy, surround her, completely nude. Her legs are tied down "in case of convulsions", and a demonic, hairy man with glowing red eyes and sharp nails lies on top of her, dragging his nails along her arms and legs, molesting her while Guy and their neighbors watch and sing.

Waking up the following morning, Rosemary is convinced what she had experienced was just a nightmare, instigated by drinking too much at dinner without having eaten anything beforehand. Upon seeing a series of scratches on her back and sides, Guy admits that he had sex with her while she was passed out. "Don't yell, I already filed them down," he states, referring to his own fingernails. 

After a checkup with her obstetrician, Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin), Rosemary is informed that she's pregnant, but Minnie and Roman convince her to switch to a close friend of theirs, Abraham Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who advises her not to read books or take commercially distributed vitamins. Instead, he instructs her to consume a drink prepared by Minnie made with tannis root, claiming it's much safer and more natural. Soon, a persistent, sharp pain materializes in her stomach, and once Hutch inexplicably falls into a coma after doing research on the herbs Rosemary is being given as well as deciphering the true identity of Roman Castevet, Rosemary becomes convinced her neighbors are members of a coven plotting to abduct her baby and use it for their satanic rituals, and that Guy has made a deal with them: in exchange for their baby, they give him his big break.

Roman Polanski, adapting and directing his screenplay from the identically titled 1967 novel by Ira Levin, uses his source material to mark the second entry in his so-called "Apartment Trilogy", a trio of thematically connected psychological horror films that focus on a mentally imbalanced protagonist living in an apartment who is either paranoid their neighbors are conspiring to harm them, or is devolving into homicidal madness themselves. With Rosemary's Baby, Polanski has improved on the half-formed quality of his overall very good first apartment thriller, Repulsion, with a quiet, deliberately paced, elegantly shot, eerily scored, and superbly performed excursion into paranoia, brought to life by a stellar performance from Mia Farrow.

It's genuinely head-scratching to consider that at the 1969 Academy Awards ceremony, only one actor from Rosemary's Baby was nominated for an Oscar, which they even managed to walk away with, and it wasn't Mia Farrow. Instead, the recognition and victory went to Ruth Gordon for her deceptively charismatic supporting performance as Minnie, the stereotypically chipper and somewhat overly inquisitive old lady, and as wickedly delightful as she consistently is, it's hardly the type of role I would personally consider "Oscar-worthy". Every ounce of acting weight in Polanski's script falls upon the bony shoulders of twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow, and from the very first scene in which she cheerily brags about her husband's job as an actor (reciting by rote to anyone who asks, "He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and a lot of television plays and commercials.") to the denouement in which she ascertains the shocking truth of what's been going on behind her back the entire time, Farrow shoulders the mammoth, psychologically enervating responsibility with the career-defining performance of a lifetime. 

At the beginning of the story, Rosemary is a cheerful, dedicated housewife who wants nothing more out of life than to settle into a nice place she can call home, cater to her husband's every whim, decorate their apartment to the best of her ability, and finally become a mother. Sporting a fringed blonde bob (actually a wig), a radiant smile, and speaking in a purr that's at once curiously seductive and childlike in its positivity, Farrow captures the ebullience and innocence of the country girl Rosemary is at heart. The split second that Guy walks through the door after a long day at work, Rosemary jumps up from the floor, shouts, "Yoo-hoo!" and runs over to give him a warm, sustained hug, which Guy coldly returns with a pat on her bottom. Whenever a misfortune is leveled against him, such as being told Donald Baumgart got the role he was vying for, or that he's now received said role because Baumgart has woken up blind, Rosemary responds with a gentle support and empathy. In other words, she's the kind of woman any man would be lucky to have as their wife. Farrow is required to traverse a complex, brilliantly written arc from this exuberant, boundlessly supportive cheerleader of a wife to an anxious, isolated, suffering victim of conspiracy, manipulation, and gaslighting, a task she masters with the utmost grace, passion, poignancy, intelligence, and a contained resentment and fury that's breathtaking in its quiet power, all while retaining a touch of her inherent naivete and faith in the goodness of mankind. Her transformation is physical as well as internal, removing her wig to reveal a less attractive pixie haircut and losing enough weight to reduce herself to a skeletal appearance with a pale complexion and bruising beneath her eyes. Credit for this is to be divided between Farrow for the physical depth of her role commitment and the makeup work by Alan Snyder.

Rosemary Woodhouse is an empowering subversion of the ineffectual damsels in distress who populated horror films in the 1930s to even Night of the Living Dead, which ironically came out the same year as Rosemary's Baby, but with a female lead so weak and inadequate, you would think George Romero's zombie movie and Polanski's psychological thriller were decades removed from one another, given the former's regressive attitude about women contrasted with the latter's far more enlightened one. Once she begins to realize, with some words of support and encouragement from her good friends, that the persistent pain in her stomach is a warning something isn't right, Rosemary insists on going back to Dr. Hill for a second opinion, stops drinking Minnie's homemade beverage, and demands pills and vitamins like every other pregnant woman. After receiving a book about witchcraft left for her by a dying Hutch, who temporarily regained consciousness from his coma and left Rosemary with the cryptic message, "The name is an anagram," she returns to her apartment and uses the tiles from her Scrabble board game to decipher what he could've meant. At first, every phrase she puts together ceases to make sense, and briefly considers giving up, chalking the message up to Hutch's deteriorating mental faculties. However, after reading a passage about the thirteen-year-old son of Adrian Marcato, Rosemary comes to the realization that Roman Castevet is an anagram for Steven Marcato. She then installs a chain lock on the front door, forbidding her neighbors from coming anywhere near her or her baby. After being brought back against her will to the apartment by Guy and Dr. Sapirstein, Rosemary purposely drops her money out of her pocketbook onto the floor, knowing the men around her will put on a display of chivalry and get down on their knees to pick it up. As soon as they prove her right, she calmly sneaks into the elevator and executes her escape. Rosemary is extremely smart, resourceful, intuitive, well-read, and determined to do everything she needs to in order to protect herself and her child, her backbone growing almost visibly right before our eyes as the sensation of claustrophobia mounts like the pain in her abdomen.

As her conflicted husband, Guy, John Cassavetes offers a nuanced portrayal of wickedness that defies easy categorization. A down-on-his-luck actor craving a role that will catapult him to the big league, Guy is not a one-dimensional, frothing-at-the-mouth villain. His motivation for becoming involved in his neighbors' plot to impregnate Rosemary with the Antichrist is abundantly transparent. Now, I understand the absurdity in trying to defend a man who literally pimps his own wife out to the Devil for the sake of advancing his acting career, and I assure you I'm not. Guy's actions are inexcusable, and the subtle ways in which he attempts to control his wife, whether by refusing to allow her to see another doctor or nonchalantly throwing away the book left for her by a deceased friend, are as infuriating as they are insidious. However, Cassavetes imbues the character with a soft-spoken tenderness, a goofy sense of humor, and most importantly, an authentic reciprocation of love for his wife. Guy is a frustrated artist torn between his love and respect for Rosemary and a palpable exhilaration for the newfound success with which he's been compensated. It's pure, unadulterated selfishness that drives his most despicable misdeeds, not an ingrained malice or misogyny. He's so blinded by his own ambition for success that he legitimately can't see the pain he's causing the woman whose love for him is so unconditional and absolute that she has a sandwich waiting for him when he gets home and a cup of coffee and breakfast every morning. Cassavetes conveys the cowardice of this man, as evidenced by his timorous reassurance to Rosemary in Dr. Hill's office that nobody's going to hurt her, and elicits a couple contemptuous chuckles on two occasions. The first is when he tries to convince Rosemary that he's the one who had sex with her on baby night, idiotically adding, "it was kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way." That's the line Mr. Actor comes up with in an effort to allay his wife's suspicion. The second is when he flounders for an excuse as to why he desperately doesn't want Rosemary to see Dr. Hill for a second opinion: "I won't let you do it, Ro. I mean, because it's, uh, it's not fair to Sapirstein." Even Cassavetes himself can't help but let out a small chuckle as he utters such an intentionally ridiculous line. Nonetheless, Guy is a difficult person to outright despise, especially considering his silent expression of understanding and self-awareness, and lack of retaliation, after Rosemary spits in his face, refusing to extend him any more patience or forgiveness.

For his approach to conveying the horror of Rosemary's predicament, Polanski distinguishes his thriller from the vomit-spewing, head-spinning, in-your-face vulgarity of William Friedkin's The Exorcist by keeping the focus intimately on his protagonist's spiraling mental stability. The camera remains by Farrow's side at all times, sometimes closing in on her face to immerse the audience in her psychological and physical distress. His direction is downright uncomfortable in its sensitivity and restraint, occasionally pausing on a shot of Rosemary sitting on a chair in front of the TV, hunched over and breathing heavily, or turning over on her stomach in bed with a groan as soon as Guy leaves the room to get them each a vanilla ice cream cone. The running length is 137 minutes, and Polanski confidently refuses to rush through a single scene, trusting his audience to maintain their attention out of affection for Rosemary, compassion and empathy for her suffering, and admiration for her steadfast tenacity. 

Rosemary's Baby is the quintessential slow-burn, establishing a sense of domestic normality and bliss from the outset, enmeshing itself in the personal lives of its characters, holding the camera on Farrow and Cassavetes as they slowly undress themselves in the dark after dinner, zeroing in on their sexual passion for one another as they make out and cuddle in bed, laughing among themselves over the quaintness of their neighbors' attitudes and decor. Krzysztof Komeda and William A. Fraker respectively emphasize the cheerful positivity of these early scenes with an upbeat score and bright lighting that reflect the optimistic state of mind of Rosemary when she first moves in to the Bramford and discovers that she's pregnant. Toward the final act, when Rosemary finds herself hiding in the linen closet wielding a long kitchen knife, Fraker bathes the screen in shadows and blackness. Sam O'Steen and Bob Wyman use montages to demonstrate the passing of time as Rosemary's due date grows closer and closer, capturing her at her most elated as she paints the walls and sets up a newly arrived crib and unpacks her baby clothes. Each scene flows smoothly into the next, never allowing the imposing runtime to drag. Take the scene where Dr. Sapirstein confides to Rosemary that Roman supposedly has a month left to live and promises to see to it that he and Minnie depart to their next location ahead of schedule; in the following scene, Rosemary and Guy are seeing them off in the street.

The horror manifests in an understated way, beginning with the sharp pain in Rosemary's stomach. From that point forward, the music curdles into an eerie, disorienting tune to accentuate her growing consternation. Prior to the sequence when Rosemary falls victim to the cult's objective, Polanski sets a foreboding atmosphere through the incoherent chanting that emanates from the paper-thin wall of the Woodhouses' bedroom and an incessant ticking of an unseen clock. If you're in the market for fast-paced gore, heart-palpitating jump scares, or a high body count, Polanski is thrilled to disappoint. Only three characters are physically terrorized by the devil worshippers, and only one of those three actually dies. The first victim is Terry, the Castevets' original victim, who commits suicide to avoid having to bear Satan's offspring; the second is Donald Baumgart, Guy's competitor who is blinded so the latter can steal his high-profile role; and the sole victim to lose their life is Hutch, who falls into a coma and passes away a few months later. Polanski also makes the bold decision to refrain from visualizing any of these injuries, fatal and non-fatal, instead briefly displaying Terry's bloody corpse after she has jumped from the window, and conveying the fates of Donald and Hutch in telephone conversations. In a peculiarly striking directorial touch, in both the scene where Guy receives the phone call informing him about Donald and Rosemary about Hutch, Polanski films them in the doorway of their bedroom with their faces concealed from the frame. I'm not sure if there's an artistic reason behind that framing choice, but either way it's certainly memorable.

Those aren't the only two instances in which Polanski uses dialogue to uncover the sinister twists in his screenplay and further enhance the creeping sense of dread. While Rosemary is sitting in Dr. Sapirstein's office, his secretary compliments the perfume she has on, calling it an improvement on her usual one. Rosemary informs her that wasn't a perfume, but rather the tannis root in the good luck necklace she had been wearing, and that she has thrown it away. "Good," the secretary remarks. "Maybe the doctor will follow your example." Just from that one throwaway line, Rosemary's distrust has instantly spiked up, and by extension, so has ours. We are told that Sapirstein's aftershave contains the same rancid smell, and therefore he must be part of the plot against our defenseless heroine. As the atmospheric music plays in the background, Rosemary leaves the office and enters a phone booth to call Dr. Hill, pleading with him to schedule an appointment with her, and Sapirstein lurks outside with his back facing Rosemary's. After hanging up, she turns around and recognizes the deceitful doctor from behind. She turns her head away and closes her eyes, praying that her mind is playing a cruel trick on her, and right before she opens them again, Sapirstein walks off and is quickly replaced by another man in a similarly colored suit. Was Rosemary just imagining that it was Sapirstein because of her distrust in him? We know the answer, but she's not quite as certain.

Polanski also uses passages from the book that Hutch left for Rosemary, All of Them Witches, to illuminate elements of the plot, including the true nature of tannis root -- also known as "the Devil's Pepper" -- and the methods satanists employ to rid themselves of any outside interferences. Through the eyes of Rosemary, we read that they can blind, deafen, paralyze, or kill their victims by putting a spell on a single article of their clothing. This leads to the moment Rosemary calls Donald Baumgart (genuinely astonished to realize she's actually on the phone with Tony Curtis) and learns that Guy stole his tie the day they met for drinks, which also happened to be the day before Donald woke up without his sight. This concisely written exposition also confirms our suspicion that Hutch's sudden unexplained illness was engineered by the cult for his becoming too involved in their nefarious activities.

By today's standards, Rosemary's Baby may come across as campy and relentlessly slow, neither of which is a fundamentally blasphemous trait for a horror movie to possess. Thematically speaking, however, Polanski's exploration of prenatal paranoia and the loss of female bodily autonomy packs a timelessly relevant punch in 2024. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, a five-decade-old decision that granted every woman the right to obtain a legal, sometimes life-saving abortion, women in certain states have been robbed of their ability to make a choice regarding their own bodies. If a woman feels she isn't ready to become a mother, doesn't have the financial assets to support a child, or even if she was raped and became impregnated with her rapist's child, some states now have the disgusting authority to force them to carry the fetus to full term and give birth against their will. Rosemary's situation isn't substantially different. She may be eager to become a mother, but her psychotic, devil-worshipping neighbors decide for themselves that she must give birth to Satan's son rather than Guy's. They drug her, tie her down, force her to get raped by Satan, manipulate her to consume their own substances to help the Antichrist grow healthily, knock her unconscious with sedatives when she objects to their oppressive treatment, and threaten to have her committed to a mental hospital if she keeps expressing her valid concerns to other people. Her own husband shames her into eating poisoned mousse that she can't stand the taste of, refuses to allow her to see another doctor for a second opinion, expects her to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner ready for him every day, and, along with Sapirstein, dissuades her from educating herself with books. Then the one person she turns to for help, who she believes in her heart is a decent human being who will listen to what she has to say, and who in fact is not involved in the conspiracy, betrays her trust, brazenly breaching the patient/physician confidentiality, and hands her back into the arms of the toxic men she's been desperately running from.

On a quiet afternoon alone in her apartment, Rosemary begins reading when Minnie and her friend, Laura-Louise (Patsy Kelly, fully leaning into the camp with an unabashedly over-the-top performance), ring the doorbell and compel her to invite them inside. (Notice her head drops when she looks through the peephole and sees who's on the other side.) While sitting on the couch having a conversation with Hutch, Roman arrives at the front door asking for Guy. When Rosemary tells him he isn't home, Roman just stands there, expecting her to invite him in anyway. Right after Rosemary reveals her pregnancy to Guy, he eagerly rushes across the hall to inform the Castevets (after receiving an obviously reluctant nod of approval from Rosemary), who burst into the apartment to congratulate her and insist that she switch out her obstetrician, whom she already met and developed a trust with, for their accomplice. From the moment Rosemary becomes acquainted with the Castevets, she is stripped little by little of her independence and privacy. 

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about her enslavers is the fact that they're not the types of traditional, discernible monsters we see in our nightmares. They aren't hideously disfigured creatures disguised behind a Halloween mask, wielding knives or axes, and lurking in the shadows of the night, waiting patiently for the perfect opportunity to pounce. No, these are the types of outwardly friendly people we see in our own lives on a daily basis. They are our neighbors who flash the most sincere smiles and wave to us when we pass them on the sidewalk. They're the best people to have a casual conversation with, and they will almost always have fascinating stories to tell about what life was like back in their day, how much simpler everything was. In terms of appearance, their skin may be more wrinkled and their hair full of gray, but the only thing that distinguishes them from the rest of us is their age. There's nothing overtly threatening about them. In fact, their age and demeanors make them come across as all the more adorable and harmless and feeble. Minnie and Roman act as parental figures for their younger neighbors, cooking them a delicious steak dinner, serving them extra helpings of cake, preparing a vitamin drink for Rosemary's pregnancy, and offering to co-host their party for their similarly aged guests. It is precisely these deceptive qualities that the villains of Rosemary's Baby utilize to ingratiate themselves into the Woodhouses' lives. Also unlike most horror villains, the Castevets and their cohorts have no intention of harming Rosemary apart from getting her raped by Satan. They merely want her to give them what they've apparently dedicated their whole lives to, and after she stumbles across the truth of their plot, Roman assures her she doesn't have to join them if she doesn't want to, but encourages her to give in to her maternal instinct and simply "be a mother" to her baby.

Speaking of said revelation, the ending of Rosemary's Baby has justifiably gone down in history as one of the all-time greatest. Two hours of slow-building psychological tension and suspense finally spill over into a deliciously bonkers phantasmagoria of spine-chilling horror and overacted camp that rewards viewers' patience and then some. Rosemary has managed to piece together a most intricate puzzle, but she's just been missing that one, crucial piece. She's seconds away from finding it, a discovery so macabre and incredulous and heart-wrenching it will change her life forever, and there's absolutely nothing the satanists, her husband, or we the audience can do to deter her. We may never get to see those much-talked-about eyes of the titular newborn, but Farrow's spot-on facial expression, her eyes widened with mind-boggling terror, her mouth agape with a hand covering it, combined with that perfectly timed orchestral music cue on the soundtrack, tell us everything we need to know. And it drives home Polanski's most prominent message in a way that's as forthright as it is bleak: just because you're paranoid doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong.

7.6/10