Director – Natalie Erika James, Screenplay – Natalie Erika James, Skylar James & Christian White, Screen Story – Skylar James, Based on the Novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, Producers – Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller, John Krasinski & Allyson Seeger, Photography – Arnau Valls Colomer, Music – Peter Gregson & Adam Price, Visual Effects Supervisor – Kevin Cahill, Visual Effects – Atomic Arts (Supervisor – Justin Cornish), Special Effects Supervisors – Neil Champion, Paul Clayton & Gerry Glynn, Sequin Satan – Weta Workshop Limited, Prosthetic Effects – Mimic FX (Supervisor – Rogier Samuels), Production Design – Simon Bowles. Production Company – Platinum Dunes/Sunday Night
Cast
Julia Garner (Terry Gionoffrio), Dianne Weist (Minnie Castevet), Kevin McNally (Roman Castevet), Jim Sturgess (Alan Marchand), Marli Siu (Annie Leung), Rosy McEwen (Vera Clarke), Andrew Buchan (Leo Watts), Tina Gray (Mrs Gardenia), Anton Blake Horowitz (Casting Director), Patrick Lyster (Dr Sapirstein), Raphael Sowole (Toby)
Plot
Terry Gionoffrio has come to New York City from Nebraska and is determined to make it as a dancer only to fall and twist her ankle. She resolves to keep on auditioning despite this. She follows Alan Marchand, the producer from one audition home to his apartment, but collapses. Elderly couple Roman and Minnie Castevet who live in the building come to her aid. They offer Terry a room in a spare apartment they have and she happily moves in. A friend of theirs offers herbs that help heal Terry’s ankle. However, as she obtains the break she wants, Terry discovers that she is pregnant and that the Castevets have sinister purpose in mind.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin’s best-selling 1967 novel, is an absolute classic of the horror genre. It is here that the modern Devil Worship and Pregnancy Horrors film begins. All the clichés of Satanists in black or red robes standing around chanting in Latin and of innocents earmarked to bear the devil’s spawn have their beginnings with Rosemary’s Baby. It was a huge success and produced a major box-office boom in films dealing with Devil Worship and The Occult and Black Magic – to follow would be the massive hits of The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976).
Rosemary’s Baby is a film that is perfect as it is and needs no follow-up. On the other hand, is not as though the idea of a prequel (or at least a sequel) is a totally radical idea – after all it ends on a cliffhanger that leaves you wanting to know what happens next. There was an uninspired tv movie sequel Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976). Ira Levin even wrote his own sequel Son of Rosemary (1999) about the devil child coming of age. And that’s not mentioning the tv mini-series remake Rosemary’s Baby (2014).
Apartment 7A is a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby that comes from Michael Bay’s production company Platinum Dunes. It is worth noting that Platinum Dunes started the spate of remakes of 1970s/80s horror classics that we had in the 2000s/10s with the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Hitcher (2007), Friday the 13th (2009) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). Platinum Dunes have held the rights to Rosemary’s Baby since 2008 and were planning a remake but this never emerged, apparently due to reports they could find no way to add anything to the original. The director selected here is the Australian-Japanese Natalie Erika James who received modest acclaim with the ghost story Relic (2020). Also on the credits as a producer is John Krasinski, the director/star of Platinum Dunes’ recent hit A Quiet Place (2018).
Julia Garner as Terry GionoffrioDianne Weist as Minnie Castevet
Apartment 7A comes out amid a new spate of revivals of 1970s/80s horror classics of the 2020s. The way was begun with Blumhouse’s Halloween (2018) and sequels, which revived John Carpenter’s slasher classic, followed by others conducting a successful revival of Wes Craven’s Scream (2022) and sequels to that. In the 2023-4 season alone, we have had follow-ups to all the main classics of the 1970s occult cycle first with Blumhouse’s The Exorcist: Believer (2023), followed by the prequel The First Omen (2024) and now this Rosemary’s Baby prequel.
Apartment 7A does pay careful attention to continuity. There are replications of many shots and scenes from the original, especially the entire ending. The Bramford building is again represented by New York’s Dakota Building (in real life, the location outside which John Lennon was shot) – although despite Apartment 7A being such an iconically New York-set film, it was actually shot in the UK and has a majority British cast. There are replications of the sets of the apartment, even of the laundry room where Terry in the original (Victoria Vetri/Angela Dorian) met Mia Farrow, although that scene is not depicted here. We do get to briefly meet equivalents of the Woodhouses during the final scene (albeit with their backs turned to the camera). We get equivalents of Dr Sapirstein and the Castevets, although the film starts to fall down here as Dianne Weist’s attempts to mimic Ruth Gordon’s brassy delivery just becomes too affected and more comic than anything else, while Kevin McNally is too quiet and lacks the assured class and presence that Sidney Blackmer had.
Rather than just repeats the basics, Apartment 7A does initially draw you in with a story that has a certain emotional core. We become involved with Julia Garner and her attempts to make it as a dancer, not to mention the gruellingly sadistic audition scene where it is demanded that she perform a jeté over and over even as she twists her ankle again, before Jim Sturgess comes and asks her to act out being like a pig in the family slaughterhouse.
Julia Garner is okay but lacks what Mia Farrow and director Roman Polanski brought to the original. Polanski gave Mia’s plight a paranoia that had a blackly funny undertow. There is none of the same here. We know what is happening to Julia Garner because we have seen Rosemary’s Baby. Lacking any of the edgy uncertainty this time around, Natalie Erika James simply gives us a progression of dream jump shocks – one of my most hated directorial delivers in genre cinema, which add nothing to a film and solely exist to add a fake jump when none naturally occurs. Julia is constantly imagining seeing devil figures at the end of her bed, clawed hands reaching around her body, her stomach swollen and pregnant. It is maybe an okay version of a Pregnancy Horror film for those who are not familiar with the genre that Rosemary’s Baby created but well-worn for everybody else. James also gives us a bizarre take on the Satanic impregnation dream reimagined as though it were a Broadway musical where the other Satanists are choreographed dancers and Julia is impregnated while wearing a sequined tap dance costume and even the Devil is represented by a figure in glowing sequins.
