| Overall Grade: |
A- |
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| Story: |
A- |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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| Visuals: |
A |
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Brutally Chilling
by Jason T (movies profile)
Mar 7, 2007
7
of
7 people found this review helpful
"Rosemary's Baby" is not your average slash 'em up horror movie. It begins like any other normal late 60s melodrama. Mia Farrow is Rosemary and is moving into a HUGE Manhattan apartment with her struggling actor husband Guy. All seems fine until they meet their nosey upstairs neighbors, an old couple who seem friendly enough to Guy, but a bit off the edge for Rosemary. One odd night Guy finds out he's gotten the role of a lifetime due to the original actor going blind, and to celebrate, wants to have a baby with Rosemary. After a strange dream involving a devil-like character raping her, Rosemary discovers she's pregnant, and after a few months, starts to suspect something diabolical is going on.
Roman Polanski superbly directs what I viewed as a sublte horror film. Subtle in that *spoiler* when we come to discover the neighbors are witches and that Rosemary may in fact be carrying Satan's child, there is no hammy build up with cheap shots and bad music. Instead of cliche', we get realistic circumstances. Ruth Gordon, who won the Oscar for best supporting actress 1968 as the old woman neighbor, is a witch we discover, is evil we discover, but does she act evil? No. Does she even hint she would be evil? No. She is normal. A normal, nosey old woman we all can recognize. That's the horror of the movie. That it's telling us forms of the devil don't come in red and fire, but more in the images we are comfortable with. Images we would not run away from. In the final scene where Rosemary stands in an open room and see's the baby carriage with her demon child, Gordon comes up to her and offers her some tea, as if nothing remotely odd is going on, and as if they are still friends. Because Polanski knows that this will make the audience think even more. Is Rosemary indeed hallucinating all of this? Could she be insane? Or are there supernatural things at work here?
My only mild complaint is that "Rosemary's Baby" perhaps needed a thicker payoff. We have rooted for Mia Farrow over two hours. We have stood by her and given her our attention. The fact she just accepts the baby as her own and didn't try to do something (in the book she kills herself and the child) makes a bit of a disappointing climax. The fact we don't get to see the baby is fine. It should be left up to our imaginations. A quick shot of the baby would ruin the effect of future viewings of the film. We got to see the devil's face, that was scary enough.
All in all one of the best horror films ever made. Kudos not only to Gordon, but really to Mia Farrow, who makes for a convincing, fragile heroine, delicate but brave, pretty but not stupid. |
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