Apartment 7A (Trailer Review)

"I came here for one reason: to make something of myself. To be on stage. To see my name in big lights. But dreams don't always come true."

These are the achingly relatable and sobering words of Terry Gionoffrio, the young protagonist of Natalie Erika James' sophomore directorial outing, Apartment 7A. You may recall Terry as the ill-fated recovering drug addict first introduced in Roman Polanski's 1968 psychological supernatural horror classic, Rosemary's Baby. Originally portrayed by Angela Dorian, Terry was doing her laundry in the basement of the eerie "Black Bramford" New York City apartment building at the same time as newly arrived tenant Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow). The two ladies engaged in a friendly conversation in which Terry divulged that she was living across the hall from Rosemary with an elderly married couple, the eccentric but disarmingly kind and giving Castevets, who picked Terry up off the sidewalk and opened their door to her with seemingly no hesitation or conditions. She described them as "real grandparents," treating her "like the daughter they never had." Feeling as though she's found a confidant, Terry suggests they do their laundry together every day, so as to counteract the creepiness of being a young woman alone in a basement.

Despite Terry's gregarious and uninhibited demeanor, as well as her aforementioned suggestion, Rosemary and her husband, Guy, found her lying dead on the sidewalk the following night in front of their building, having apparently jumped from her window. Wrapped around her bloodied neck is the foul-smelling good-luck charm gifted to her by Minnie.

Turning back the clock to earlier that year, 1965, Apartment 7A shines the spotlight on Dorian's short-lived but unforgettable character, now embodied by Ozark's Julia Garner, one of the most versatile up-and-coming actresses working today. She may lack her usual blonde afro, replaced by the necessary brown of her predecessor's hair color, but those expressive eyes, shining with a mix of hope and apprehension in the trailer's first close-up frame, instantly inform us who we're looking at.

Terry has made the move to the Big Apple to pursue her lifelong dream as a dancer. However, while performing a dance on stage in a live theatrical production, she twists her ankle and collapses on her back, screaming in cringe-inducing agony. While not explicitly stated, it can be assumed that this career-ending injury is the catalyst for Terry's descent into drugs.

One day, as she's stumbling along a sidewalk, Terry is greeted by the married Satanists we know from 1968, Roman and Minnie Castevet. The role that (somewhat questionably) won the darkly delightful Ruth Gordon an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1969 is now filled in by Dianne Wiest, who's paired with Kevin McNally in place of Sidney Blackmer. "We wanna help," Roman earnestly insists. Taking an instant liking and sympathy to the troubled young woman, Roman and Minnie invite Terry to stay with them. Disregarding her clearly intelligent friend's (Marli Siu) perceptive warning ("Terry, you don't even know these people."), she takes them up on their offer. "Look, moving into my own place feels like a first step," Terry counters. (I mean, technically it isn't her own place, it's the Castevets', but whatever.)

While putting her stuff into her new bureau, Terry uncovers the crumpled shoe of the former tenant, who Minnie claims "skipped out of here like Cinderella at midnight" before tossing it in the trash. At first, I imagine, things go well for the recovering Terry, who's grateful to have been given a fresh start thanks to these goodhearted strangers. However, as time goes on, she begins to notice unsettling things about her supposed life savers, and comes to realize they may have had ulterior motives for opening their door to her so graciously.

At just under two and a half minutes, the trailer for Apartment 7A doesn't reveal too much or generate as much intrigue as I had anticipated. I've been a huge fan of Polanski's original psychological thriller since I first saw it during my senior year of high school. I was 18, and finally mature enough to appreciate a more refined vision of horror than what I had grown up with (the more in-your-face, blood-and-guts variety of the slashers of the 1970s/80s). When I first received notice on Upcoming Horror Movies that a prequel was being developed by Natalie Erika James (director/co-writer of the 2020 supernatural dementia parable, Relic) and set to star Julia Garner, I was instantly intrigued. Even more so when Bloody Disgusting revealed the plot would center on Terry, detailing her final days leading to her tragically inevitable suicide. (This isn't a spoiler since anyone who's seen Rosemary's Baby already knows her fate.)

It's a solid approach to reviving a 50-year-old horror legend. Alas, following my initial viewing of the trailer, my excitement for the upcoming supernatural horror prequel has been considerably dimmed. Of course, it's impossible (not to mention unethical) to accurately assess a movie based on its trailer. After all, we're not provided with the vital ingredients that produce a quality genre picture: suspense, tension, character development. Those are crafted by the filmmakers: the writers, directors, cast, cinematographers, editors, and so on. No, the trailers are created by the distributor's marketing department, whose sole objective is to attract an audience via editing together a collage of footage that will appeal to our most basic sensibilities. As a result, Apartment 7A assaults our senses with Dutch angles, obnoxiously loud sound effects, repeated footage of Garner's twisted ankle, and of course, religious iconography that seems to be dominating the horror landscape at the moment.

One of the assets that makes Rosemary's Baby such a standout in the field of religious/demonic possession horror is its restraint, a quality this prequel wouldn't seem to know if it whacked it upside the head. For the centerpiece conception sequence of Polanski's adaptation, Mia Farrow is shamed into eating a cup of chocolate mousse laced with sleeping pills. Soon after, she collapses on the floor, and John Cassavetes carries her to bed and removes her nightgown. Unable to keep her eyes open, she gives in to sleep and drifts off into an initially serene dream. She's suddenly on a cruise ship, being led down into the hull where she lies down on a mattress. By her side are her husband and all of their neighbors, clad in their Birthday suits. They tie Farrow's legs, remove her wedding ring, and repeat a satanic chant while a furry, inhuman creature with sharp fingernails and glowing red eyes begins to rape her. When she awakes the next morning in her own bed, she's naked and clueless as to what happened. Her back is covered in scratches, but her husband assures her they belong to him, reasoning he "didn't wanna miss baby night."

Soon after, Rosemary is informed she's pregnant, and the remainder of the film is saturated in an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia. Her neighbors take an obsessive interest in her pregnancy, always popping in at random, demanding she change her doctor with whom she feels comfortable for one of their close friends. Instead of taking the vitamins prescribed to her by her original doctor, Rosemary is ordered to consume a vitamin drink made of mysterious herbs by Minnie. Guy is offered a prominent role in a play after his competitor inexplicably goes blind. A close friend of hers suddenly falls into a coma, sending her a book on witchcraft before dying in the hospital. For some reason, Guy trashes the book. The repellent odor emanating from the necklace gifted to her by Minnie is present in the aftershave used by Dr. Sapirstein. Is Rosemary simply suffering from a case of prenatal paranoia, or is she the center of a legitimate conspiracy by her neighbors and her own husband? 

Polanski withheld the answer until the final shocking scene, which remains one of the most breathtaking and intense endings in horror history, with an effective dash of overacted camp. Even then, Polanski refused to aim the camera at the source of the jaw-dropping terror, relying on Farrow's stellar acting and Krzysztof Komeda's bone-chilling score to paint a picture in our minds more traumatizing than anything that could've been displayed onscreen. 

The maiming and death of two minor characters are executed off-screen. No pea soup vomit is spewed on anybody. No heads are twisted around at 360 degrees. Polanski presented the horror in the most subtle, mundane fashion imaginable, shrewdly avoiding the excess of gore and special effects that characterize more modern interpretations of this sort of tale. He submerged the audience in his protagonist's tortured mindset, inviting us to share in her isolation, her steadily mounting discomfort, her mind-boggling panic, and ultimately her eye-widening, mouth-gaping horror. It's a masterful exercise in empathy.

To the contrary, director James, working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Christian White, based on a previous draft by Skylar James, seems as though she's sacrificing that very artful restraint she exhibited in her soulful feature debut in favor of the more stereotypical jump scares and sensational imagery utilized in recent demonic possession thrillers. At one point, there's an ominous knock on the door. Terry looks through the peephole, and a loud, corny scream accompanies the sight of Dianne Wiest, waiting with a vaguely intimidating expression. Most likely this cliched sound effect is only used in the trailer, but it paints an unflattering picture of the sophistication level this movie is aiming for. "What's the holdup, dear?" asks Wiest with a cartoonishly exaggerated Jewish accent. In addition to lacking a physical resemblance to her Oscar-winning predecessor, Wiest appears to lack her subtlety as well, playing the role with more obvious malevolence and less of the disarmingly quirky, nosy joviality that made Gordon's portrayal such a blast. Here, after Terry asks Minnie to leave, she looks again through the peephole, and Wiest delivers a conspicuously insincere smile before turning around and walking off, jangling what looks like a set of keys.

However, there is a tense-looking scene where Minnie gives Terry a haircut while chastising her for being "ungrateful" for her and her husband's generosity. "Maybe I shouldn't have bothered," Minnie says, harshly turning Terry's head to the side. "Every single thing handed to you on a silver platter." While cutting her hair, Minnie accidentally(?) cuts Terry's ear with the scissors. It's an effectively squirm-inducing moment because it's so relatable. We all get haircuts, and we all feel that little hint of nervousness as our stylist cuts away at our hair, the scissors so close to our ears, in the hands of someone who may not care about our well-being, who just wants to get the job done and move on to their next customer. In the final shot of this scene, Garner looks at herself unhappily in a mirror, her hair now styled shortly like that of Dorian, and Wiest stands behind her, glaring.

Fearing that something awful befell the young girl who lived with the Castevets before her, Terry goes to a church (of course) and speaks with a nun, who tearfully reveals, "They did ungodly things to her! And now they've chosen you!" I seriously hope this character is written with more believability than what's shown here, because her lines sound exceedingly hackneyed and on-the-nose. Later, Terry looks at herself in a mirror and hallucinates that she's pregnant, screaming at the sight of something moving in her stomach. This is exactly the type of surreal, not even original, imagery that Polanski cleverly pulled back from, trusting his audience to identify with Rosemary's fear without the assistance of cheap jump-out-of-your-skin jolts. In a subsequent scene, Terry is lying on a table while an obstetrician either examines her or helps her deliver a baby. Feeling something painful pass through her, Terry screams and kicks the doctor against a wall. When Terry shoots up, the woman is convulsing. Something tells me this is a nightmare sequence, another cheap device favored by filmmakers desperate to keep their viewers from dozing off.

From this point onward, we get a lot of disorienting footage of Garner performing on stage, dressed in elaborate costumes and dresses, accompanied by a tuxedoed Jim Sturgess in a role left unclear by the trailer. But are these scenes real, or are they occurring only in the dreams/fantasies of a disturbed young woman desperate for a second shot at stardom? "This is so much bigger than me," a teary-eyed Terry frantically tells her friend, who doesn't believe the desire for success is worth all this. "And I can't run from it." Three pairs of hands tighten into fists behind Garner. Someone attacks her with a knife. A group of cultists gather around someone, likely Terry, dressed in hooded capes. (Not as unsettling or daring as elderly people going nude.) Except for one character, who wears a white, horned demon mask. (Also not as plainly disturbing as a human-looking man with clawed hands and glowing red eyes.) 

Like most trailers for horror films, the pace begins slowly enough to establish the setup and relationship between the primary characters, then accelerates as the mood becomes more unhinged and the imagery more surreal and unsettling. A lot of disconnected footage is randomly stitched together, making it difficult to make out much in the way of plot. On one hand, that may be a good thing, since too many trailers essentially unfold as the entire movie condensed into two minutes. Since this is a prequel to Rosemary's Baby, we already know how things are going to end for poor Terry, and that air of fatalism hangs over Apartment 7A like a dark cloud. Of course, it also comes with the side effect of depriving the ending of the ability to shock. But who knows? Maybe Apartment 7A is secretly, ahem, pregnant with some genuinely unexpected surprises that we won't see coming. 

Based on this trailer, however, I can't say I feel much of anything. It didn't give me the chills, offer anything that seems groundbreaking, or generate anticipatory excitement. It looks like just another generic entry in the increasingly overplayed demonic possession subgenre, overloaded with flashy, scattershot visuals, unoriginal special effects, ear-splitting stingers on the soundtrack, and unremarkable music. In other words, the emphasis appears to be on sensationalism at the expense of the slow-building, character-driven dread and mystery that distinguished Polanski's film and made it a classic in both the demonic possession and psychological thriller subgenres. 

"Baby's here to stay," declares Minnie. But something tells me this movie will fade from the memory just as swiftly as it's delivered.

Apartment 7A is set to premiere at Fantastic Fest later this month before being simultaneously released in the United States via video-on-demand and on Paramount+ on September 27th.

Will Apartment 7A confound expectations and live up to its distinguished forebear, or add another soulless, effects-heavy entry to the supernatural horror subgenre? Watch the trailer below and let me know what you think.