ROSEMARY'S BABY

One of the best films released by Paramount, under Robert Evans, and directed by Roman Polanski in his early career of English-language films that remains an iconic classic of the New Age of Hollywood is Rosemary’s Baby, a very bleak and eerie thriller of psychological horror that never exaggerates on the genre but remains subtle in its seemingly normal surroundings. From the beginning of the film, the eerie atmosphere is brought out by Mia Farrow’s non-diegetic singing of a lullaby, which sounds pretty and sweet but haunting and eerie as it plays over the large Gothic apartment building in New York City where much of the action takes place.
The sight of the apartment, which was shot at the Dakota, with its black wall coverings and bars in the courtyard, gives the feel of an imprisoned, claustrophobic space for the main character Rosemary and her husband Guy. It seems like a quiet and desolate building to stay, except for the loud-mouthed neighbors Minnie and Roman Castevet, whose arguments are heard through the walls, along with a strange chanting. When their young ward turns up dead from jumping out of the window, it’s the first instant where something horrifying is noticed in this apartment, which already has a sinister history for housing witches and a Satanic leader named Adrian Marcato. Roman and Minnie appear disturbed by this tragic incident, yet they heal very soon and cheerfully intrude on the lives of Rosemary and Guy and invite them for a highly talkative dinner. Their interest displayed in the couple is friendly yet nosy in an eccentric fashion, especially when Roman talks to Guy in private and we don’t know what they’re discussing, except Roman’s puff smoke emitting from the den. It makes the elderly couple eccentric in a way that doesn’t reveal too much for Rosemary to suspect, we hardly even leave Rosemary’s perspective to see what is going on outside of her tight space in the gloomy apartment.
It takes an even darker turn when Rosemary dozes off from a dinner with wine and a weirdly tasting chocolate mousse and finds herself in a nightmarish montage of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and a hairy black creature crawling on top of her her naked body, surrounded by black and green fog that gives the sequence a dream-like quality. It’s from this moment that we first see Rosemary as a vulnerable victim of mysterious plots at hand that she has no understanding of until she turns up pregnant. If the dream sequence was one that expressed nightmarish imagery, the rest of the horror is expressed more through subtlety, such as the moments where we see her holding her body in pain and hear the eerie score of Krzysztof Komeda, which implies there may be more to this pregnancy than just normal pain in pregnancy. It’s all the more odd that this begins after Minnie and Roman send her to a doctor very hastily after saying the doctor she had originally is not good if no one has heard of him. The fast pace the couple show in helping Rosemary and giving her a strangely tasted herbal drink accumulates on how suspiciously helpful they are for a woman who just moved in not too long ago. Ruth Gordon portrays Minnie with a sweet edge of humor and eccentricity combined and Sidney Blackmer brings soft-spoken charisma to Roman, which prevents them from being openly scary but appear as just eccentric old people who are being “too friendly” as Rosemary says to one of her friends.
In regards to Mia Farrow’s performance as Rosemary, she brings a nervous and vulnerable edge to the young woman the more frantic and paler she grows with her painful pregnancy. She suffers so much without getting any answers that she begins to suspect her neighbors and their friends are apart of a witches’ coven that is plotting something sinister for her and her unborn child. The scene where she confesses her suspicions to her former doctor in a hasty and tearful pace shows show how disturbed she feels about her suspicions and that there is something to fear. At the same time, we can’t be too sure if her suspicions are real and if her husband Guy is also involved in the plot against her after all the times he assures her that she’s overreacting and that she should trust the old people to help her. John Cassavetes can easily come off seductive as Guy in the way he assures Rosemary that all is well with his sharp looks and charming all-American voice, yet at the same is carrying a dark edge to him with his devilish eyes and strange distance he maintains from her. Since we only have Rosemary reacting to all of the strange happenings and no one helping her, we don’t know if she’s really overreacting and having a paranoid suspicion or if the plot is real and Polanski won’t let us find out early enough.
The approach Polanski takes with this film, as he does with his other films, is not to reveal anything except from the main character’s point of view until the end so that it keeps the uncertainty very haunting and shocking once it is revealed. The paranoia that fills the atmosphere makes the film all the more nightmarish and cloudy in its depiction of psychological horror without resorting to special effects or grim violence or monsters. It’s Polanski’s subtle outlook on the ordinary yet dark surroundings of the apartment building and Rosemary’s psyche that gives Rosemary’s Baby a mixture of ambiguity and frightening truth.