How well do you know your “Rosemary’s Baby“? In Roman Polanski’s 1968 film and in Ira Levin’s novel published the year before, new Bramford tenant Rosemary Woodhouse meets a young woman in the basement laundry room, Terry Gionoffrio, who says the Castavets rescued her from drug addiction and homelessness. Smash cut to the next day, and her mangled corpse is found in a pool of her own blood outside the Bramford apartment complex, having jumped to her death. (The actual building is the Dakota, a German Renaissance-inspired, 94-unit coop on 72nd Street on the Upper West Side.)
“Apartment 7A,” the atmosphere-drenched, classed-up new film directed by talented “Relic” filmmaker Natalie Erika James, is a direct prequel to “Rosemary’s Baby” that focuses entirely on Terry’s story and the events that led to her suicide. It doesn’t blow open or reinvent the “Rosemary’s Baby” mythology, but it’s a decent primer to attract younger audiences back to the 1968 classic film. Terry is played by the ever superb “Ozark” triple Emmy winner Julia Garner, eventually in a Gwen Verdon-style, brunette coiffure that suits the blonde-haired, fair-skinned, sharp-cheekboned actress recently cast as Madonna. As Minnie and Roman Castavet — played by Oscar winner Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer in Polanski’s movie — “Apartment 7A” features the great Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally, who both eerily resemble and sound like their predecessors. Close your eyes while Wiest, in horned-rimmed sunglasses and outrageous hats and outfits, is speaking, and she’s a dead ringer for Gordon in speech.
That commitment to continuity makes sense for a movie that ends literally where the aforementioned scene outside the Bramford in “Rosemary’s Baby” begins — and after a musical sequence that once again illustrates James’ penchant for an outré, brazen finale to her genre pictures. “Apartment 7A” feels rote and familiar — the structure is very similar to the original film’s, with Garner here as an ingénue a la John Cassavetes, but being gaslit and having her body surveilled and attacked the same way Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse was. The premise is that Terry was the Castavets’ last failed attempt to spawn the son of Satan before they moved on to Rosemary. The terrain isn’t especially novel compared to “Rosemary’s Baby” — the ahead-of-its-time, original movie about terror being done to women’s bodies and their autonomy being wrested from them — but “Apartment 7A” is still a low-key, moody thriller with a strong Garner who begins a meek ballerina with a bad ankle and ends up a defiant, stentorian presence finally back on her own two feet.
“You have to take it easy on those pills,” Terry’s friend Annie (Marli Siu) tells her after another busted audition, Terry dry-swallowing a handful of downers. “Of course it is,” a bleary Terry replies, smiling a teary smile. The best scene of “Apartment 7A” follows Terry into an empty theater where she’s asked to audition for an influential Broadway producer, Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess), and a sexist, toxic casting director who asks Terry to perform a certain ballet leap over, and over, and over. And that’s despite it being the very leap that caused her to collapse onstage during a past production, unfortunately leaving her with the career-scarring nickname of The Girl Who Fell.
But Terry refuses to be humiliated and instead cannily follows Sturgess back to his home, which appears to be the Bramford (our first view of the building made famous in “Rosemary’s Baby”). Yet the pills start kicking in, and she collapses outside the entrance, where she’s taken in literally by Minnie and Roman, the tannis-wielding satan worshippers who will eventually go on to hijack Rosemary Woodhouse’s body and soul while rewarding her husband Guy’s (Cassavetes) career.
Very soon, and more familiar echoes of “Rosemary’s Baby” are padded into “Apartment 7A,” which James co-wrote with Christian White and Skylar James and which is convincingly set in 1965. A scene in which the unctuousness-oozing Alan (obviously an evil-doing emissary of the Castavets’) spikes Terry’s drink with whatever gave Rosemary’s chocolate mousse that chalky undertaste leads into a dark musical fantasy that turns into a nightmare. There’s a sort of Mandela effect around “Rosemary’s Baby” for some viewers who think they saw the Devil or at least its eyes — “what have you done to its eyes?!” — which isn’t the case. But the Devil indeed makes an appearance in “Apartment 7A” as covered in… glittering sequins? It’s a dazzlingly deranged image, as creative as the unzipping of a body’s skin in “Relic,” and it shows James as a true horror stylist with a unique vision. Some of the jump scares and quick flashes to and from that same Devil later in and throughout the movie feel… less inspired. In a sequence that only implies the bodily violence going on here, the Satanic creature rapes her, and we know what’s now taking place inside her womb.
“Apartment 7A” works best as an “All About Eve” meets “Black Swan” backstage warring-of-the-divas drama, with a touch of Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” in the scene-setting (Arnau Valls Colomer takes care of the naturally lit cinematography) and the sudden twisting and crunching of limbs and bones. “Blue Jean” breakout Rosy McEwen plays Terry’s top rival fighting to be on top of the call sheet, only to be eliminated once the Castavets start fulfilling the same promise they offered to Guy Woodhouse: Provide us with a vessel for the son of Satan, and we will give you your stage and screen career on a silver platter. Terry takes the deal, but not without a hefty price on her sanity. That pesky Dr. Saperstein — whose line apparently is only a direct one to the Casavets — is even back to accuse her of female hysteria, much as he will go on to do (or did, depending on how you’re talking about this movie in relationship to the first) with Rosemary Woodhouse.
Once Terry catches a whiff of what Minnie and Roman are really up to — aided by a hokey textbook and an even hokier encounter with a nun who tells her to stay the hell away — “Apartment 7A” unfolds very much to the tempo of “Rosemary’s Baby,” where Mia Farrow threw herself into phone booths and lifts to evade a gaggle of gaslighters. There’s nothing especially mold-breaking here, though an ending moment elicits a gasp even as “Apartment 7A” ends with a cruel shrug — and perhaps the best thing I can say about that is that now I immediately want to rewatch “Rosemary’s Baby.” Plus, Garner gives a captivatingly distressed performance as a woman being attacked from all sides, where the only way out is through a window.
Grade: B-
“Apartment 7A” premiered at 2024 Fantastic Fest. The film streams on Paramount+ beginning Friday, September 27.
