Starring Julia Garner, Dianne Weist, Jim Sturgess, Kevin McNally  

Directed by Natalie Erika James

Streaming on Paramount+

Some Rosemary’s Baby spoilers, but after half a century I think that’s allowed.

A struggling young dancer finds herself consumed by dark forces when a well-connected older couple take her in and her fortunes seem to be changing for the better.

When is a prequel not a prequel? That is the question… even if it’s not quite a Shakespearean one.

In the opening act of Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror masterpiece, Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow’s Rosemary bumps into Terry Gionoffrio in the basement laundry room. Terry speaks openly about her past as an addict and prostitute. An elderly couple – Mr and Mrs Castavet – found her on the pavement and took her in and she can’t say enough about how kind they have been. A few days later, Rosemary and her husband come home to find Terry dead on the pavement having fallen from an upstairs window onto a pale blue Volkswagen Beetle.

Fifty-six years later, director and co-writer Natalie Erika James takes this as the starting point (or rather the end point) for her supposed prequel to the Polanski classic, asking how the unfortunate Ms. Gionoffrio met her demise. On paper this must have looked like a half decent idea, but there’s many a slip  and ’twixt pitch and script. Where to start?

Presumably to make Terry more sympathetically heroic, this version of the character is no longer the ‘fallen woman’ of the original (a carefully placed counterpoint to Mia Farrow’s innocent elfin vulnerability). Julia Garner serves up a feisty, ambitious dancer whose only dalliance with drugs is a few understandable painkillers to deal with the broken ankle scuppering her career. It’s 2024 and we need our female protagonists to have balls, right?

Well, yes, but that doesn’t make them better characters. It seems as if Natalie Erika James, Skylar James & Christian White are giving the finger to the elfin vulnerability of Farrow’s performance in a bid to bring the story into the 21st century, but that’s to misread the complexity of Polanski’s Rosemary. Yes, Farrow’s characterisation is elfin, and she is vulnerable, but Rosemary is by no means stupid and she’s not weak. Farrow gives us a woman struggling fight against the gaslighting sexual mores of the time. Garner’s Terry is a more recognisably modern heroine, and so when she falls for the Casavets’ ploys we are just annoyed with her. Indeed James has recycled the Faustian pact Guy Woodhouse makes in the original and implanted it into Terry. She only has herself to blame. What a dolt.

But, I hear you say, it’s a prequel, it’s a different film, she’s not supposed to be the same as Rosemary. Except that it isn’t and she is. A prequel to Rosemary’s Baby would tell us how on earth a witches’ coven ended up in Manhattan, and why they in particular were looking for a woman to bear Satan’s child. What we get in Apartment 7A is essentially a lukewarm remake of the original with even less of the prequel-worthy backstory. Worse, the backstory established by Polanski and original novelist Ira Levin is traded in for a ropey #MeToo strand with Jim Sturgess playing an oily Broadway producer called Alan Marchand.

We are introduced to Mrs Gardenia, Rosemary and Guy’s predecessor in the flat, recently deceased in the original, but we are left none the wiser as to why she does what she does. But worst of all where Rosemary’s Baby is a cruel, slow burn Satanistic Gaslight, which has us on the edge of our seats yelling at Mia Farrow just to believe in herself that little bit more, here we know exactly what’s going to happen, and there’s not a scary moment to be had.

Perhaps the makers of this movie would argue that it’s designed for an audience who have never seen the original, but if so, why quote so copiously from the source material? And rather than rejecting the narrative warp and weft of its progenitor they would have done well to study quite why Rosemary’s Baby is the cult chiller that it is.

A clue lies in Krysztof Komeda’s unforgettable 1968 score. There’s actually very little of it, because the story and characterisations do the work. What there is consists of variations on the iconic theme, sometimes lullaby, sometimes harmonised into tooth grinding discord. In Apartment 7A the whole movie is underscored with a kind of amorphous spooky lift music, bearing little or no relation to the action on screen. When Komeda’s theme strikes up in the final moment, it only served to remind me what I’d been missing.

Verdict: Apartment 7a is a pedestrian and annoyingly unscary ‘D’ movie hijacking respected IP to pull in an audience. There’s a perfectly decent prequel to Rosemary’s Baby to be made one day, but this isn’t it. 3/10

Martin Jameson

http://www.ninjamarmoset.com