Rosemary’s Baby

Based on the novel by Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby follows a young couple (John Cassavetes’ Guy and Mia Farrow’s Rosemary) as they move into an ornate old building and set out to start their lives together – with Rosemary’s eventual pregnancy triggering a series of progressively sinister happenings. There’s little doubt that Rosemary’s Baby demands a fair bit of patience from the viewer, as the movie has been infused with an almost excessively deliberate pace that is, at the outset, exacerbated by the pervasively theatrical atmosphere – with the far-from-subtle performances certainly standing as the most obvious example of this. It’s just as clear, however, that writer/director Roman Polanski does an effective job of slowly-but-surely ratcheting up the tension and building an atmosphere of horror, which proves instrumental in heightening the impact of the movie’s suspense-oriented moments (eg an impressively conceived and executed dream/rape sequence). There is, as a result, no denying the effectiveness of the movie’s now-infamous final stretch, with Farrow’s incredibly stirring turn as the increasingly beleaguered protagonist certainly going a long way towards perpetuating the inherent horror of the admittedly over-the-top climax. And although Polanski does stumble here and there (eg Christopher Komeda’s dated and hopelessly overbearing score diminishes the effectiveness of at least one pivotal scene), Rosemary’s Baby, for the most part, comes off as a bona fide classic of the horror genre that still packs a considerable punch all these years later.

***1/2 out of ****