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Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth
Gordon, Sidney Blackmer & Maurice Evans
Written by Ira Levin & Roman Polanski
Directed by Roman Polanski
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What better way to spend a dreary, wet January evening than curled up on the sofa watching a good movie....like Rosemary's Baby? Well I'll tell you one way to top that - be a rebel like moi and watch Polanski's shocker-horror on ye olde VHS! Yes, you read it correctly, VHS m*%$&Łer. I still own and watch the DVD's hideous parent, or older and less attractive sibling, if you will.
Anyway, ahem, before those antibiotics I've been taking for my kidney infection really start to loosen my already hindered grip on reality, let's take a look at my film of choice for this issue: Rosemary's Baby. Shot in 1968 and set in the U.S of A, the viewer is introduced to a photogenic, young couple, Guy and Rosemary who we get to see buy a nice and spacious apartment and start home making. Apart from the suicide of a young neighbour Rosemary befriends one day in the laundry room of the flats, and a few unsavoury stories circulating about the less than wholesome history of their new surroundings, everything is just peachy.
Rosemary, brilliantly played by a young Mia Farrow, soon begins to feel a little unsettled in her new abode. This feeling of uneasiness is only heightened by Guy's newly founded friendship with a loud and domineering elderly couple who live next door. It soon becomes clear that the perfectly coiffed Guy ain't quite the upstanding gentleman he makes himself out to be, as he makes a pact with the devil himself in a desperate bid to save his ailing acting career. Rosemary is an integral part of this as she becomes unwittingly (well, save for a wonderfully surreal dream sequence) impregnated with the devil's seed.
From here the film quickly descends into a whirl of chaos, paranoia and Satanism - a heady mix which is conveyed in the subtlest of ways - without even a trickle of blood or gore to be seen throughout. The power of suggestion is what makes Rosemary's Baby so goddamn eerie. Its strangely normal approach to what is extremely abnormal subject matter is exactly what makes it so memorable and disturbing, even by modern standards.
One of the many great Polanski films, Rosemary's Baby's cult status is well deserved. Part horror, part mystery, part advert for Vidal Sassoon (Mia Farrow's gamine crop, as cut by Sassoon went on to become an infamous hairstyle), it all adds up to a classic movie.
"What have you done to it? What have you done to its eyes?" Watch for the closing scene - you'll laugh AND you'll cry!
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sophia