Rosemary’s Baby: The Prequel would have been a more obvious title for Apartment 7A, for that is what it is, a straightforward precursor movie imagining that Rosemary wasn’t the first sweet young thing to become the broodmare of Satan.
If you can remember Rosemary’s Baby we were told as much in that film. And if you really really know your Rosemary’s Baby, then Julia Garner playing someone called Terry is enough to alert you as to where everything is heading.
Garner, an adept at playing wide-eyed young women in a lot of trouble, does it brilliantly again as the feisty girl from Nebraska who’s come to New York to follow her dream of being a dancer, only for a terrible injury to shatter her plans (cut to foot twisting yuckily under her weight as she lands on it).
Broke, zonked on painkillers and passing out in the street outside the building where she ended up after foolishly following a Broadway producer home, she is taken in by a kindly elderly couple who, it turns out, have a spare apartment they sometimes let out to people they take a shine to. No rent, just the satisfaction of having done a good deed. Nice to have some young blood about. And so on.
The couple are called Minnie and Roman, and all those decades ago were key elements in Roman Polanski’s original movie, where they were played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. Here it’s Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally exuding New York bonhomie with dangerous undertow.
Downstairs there’s a kindly doctor called Sapirstein, as there was in the original movie. We’re in the Dakota Apartments building too, as we should be, or that’s where the fictional Bramford’s exteriors were filmed.
So, is it going to be difficult sustaining dramatic tension if we all know where this is going? Not necessarily. In the original movie, Polanski hinted pretty firmly early on that Mia Farrow’s Rosemary had been shtupped by the Antichrist, or some other horned hell-dweller. He was more interested in building mood, using lighting and lenses to emphasise the gothic weirdness of the building and its even weirder inhabitants, something Natalie Erika James has a go at but cannot match.
Nor, let’s face it, should anyone have asked her to try. Her last movie, Relic, was also horror, and it was gobsmackingly tense, but it was fuelled by a live central idea – decay, death and generational guilt – whereas Apartment 7A runs on the ick of Satanic insemination and as horror movie juice that just isn’t enough any more.
Relic was a psychological body-horror movie. Apartment 7A is more akin to Hammer horror and it’s a touch Netflix-y too – it’s good looking, well dressed, has a good cast and doesn’t hang about, but it isn’t quite going for the jugular.
Talking of cast, Dianne Wiest, what a performance, a touch of Ruth Gordon in there but every honeyed word Minnie utters is laced with delicious malice. Jim Sturgess is also notably good, as Broadway producer Alan Marchand. Playing bad seems to suit him – he should take more roles like this.
Garner doesn’t get much to do, but then nor did Mia Farrow, beyond look increasingly vulnerable and spooked. This time round the abortion angle gets amped up a bit, adding a political angle that wasn’t so apparent when Polanski was shooting his film. But it is an injection of real-world issues, and that’s the last thing something as tremblingly fragile and supernatural as this needs.
By the end, after the pregnant Terry has made a fateful decision, a young couple are seen from the back, at the door of the building. She’s blonde, he’s dark haired. Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes have arrived. It’s as good as saying the real movie is about to begin.
Apartment 7A – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
