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Rosemary's Baby | Movie Review

Rosemary's Baby: 1968
Directed By: Roman Polanski


Rosemary's baby is an eery, haunting, bleak and darkly comic horror-noir movie which is apparently a perfect psychological horror in every sense. Directed by Roman Polanski in 1968, the film offers an awfully fatal ambience to it, which we sense from the very first moments of the film. 

The story is about a couple who is just moved into a new apartment in order to get their life started and settle there. It seems obvious that they are newly married couple, cheery and conscious of each others preferences and struggles. They were warned by one of their friend that the place have a sinister past and moving there might not be the best idea, but they disregard the idea saying that these things are just made up by people, so they moved in anyways. This couple is Rosemary and her husband, a struggling wannabe actor, played adroitly by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes respectively. But just when they move into that apartment things start to go wrong and frightful, Rosemary's gets frantic and fragile everyday. 



The couple get to meet their neighbors who live the next door, the old lonely couple who live by their own, with no children and apparent attachments to relatives. They are nosey, obnoxious and curious people, especially the old women, who is kind of lady who asks people the prices of their sofa, cushions, curtains and dishes which makes them unwelcomed by anyone. The acting is top notch by both of them particularly by Ruth Gordon, who won the Oscars for her role.

Soon, Rosemary is going to have a baby. And she is happy and does everything for the wellbeing of it and the family. The plot does not even matter now, we are interested in what the characters are going through and how they would turn out to be. There are sinister and nefarious things are going on, someone's trying to kill the baby, Rosemary suspects this and makes her insecurities visible to her husband. She sees conspiracies everywhere, everyone is involved, ''all of them witches!!", she says in one of the crucial moments of the film of utter confusion and hopelessness. 

The tension and turmoil of Rosemary expands and expands. Mia Farrow did great job portraying the doubts and confusion of Rosemary. There are few moments of ambiguity in order to make us question whether all the happenings are just fragments of her own imagination and not that of the demonic powers. That ambiguity works for the movie and create more suspense and dread. 

When we are exposed in the end to what really have happened, we have a big suprise, but at the same time we not at all suprised. We have to confront to the reality as Rosemary does at the end. We knew it was inevitable and she knew it as well. And we are left with nothing but to accept in disbelief and abhor the ones she believed the most. 
 

Rating - ★★★★½
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