Apartment 7A Asks “What If Rosemary’s Baby Was Worse?”
It’s senseless to bemoan the existence of an extension of a beloved cinema classic, because it happens so often now that it’s commonplace. A prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, a prequel to The Omen (which, ok; quite good), a sequel to Beetlejuice or, I don’t know, Eraserhead, Possession and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s the algorithm, it’s the executives, it’s money, it’s all three. It’s the same reasoning that has already caused most of the best and most famous horror classics to have, at the very least, sequels, and at most an unwieldy mixed-bag franchise. The Omen was a franchise long before The First Omen. Yet why does it feel so weird with a movie like Rosemary’s Baby, which did indeed receive a direct-to-TV sequel in 1976, and a instantly forgotten Hulu series remake 10 years ago? Maybe because Rosemary’s Baby isn’t just a horror classic—it was nominated for an Oscar, it’s high art. Or maybe it’s because this seems to be all that Hollywood is capable of now. A discarded made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby in the ‘70s is now just what most mainstream American filmmaking is, summed by prequel Apartment 7A: something stupid, easy and familiar to watch in the comfort of one’s home, confined to the medium that had once threatened to overtake cinema and is now doing so again all these years later.
Relic director Natalie Erika James’ board-approved, direct-to-streaming installment Apartment 7A officially expands Rosemary’s Baby into the official Rosemary’s Baby Cinematic Universe (RBCU). It answers the long pondered question of “What happened to that woman Rosemary Woodhouse speaks to in the laundry room for five minutes and who then kills herself a few minutes later?”
Sure, it’s a valid question, but the lack of answers provided are the entire point of its inclusion in Roman Polanski’s original film. What happened to Terry Gionoffrio, we learn, is what’s happening to Rosemary—what exactly happened between Terry and the Castevets is something we will never know. Paramount+ and a baffling ensemble of producers including John Krasinski and Michael Bay, however, have decided that that is not enough. The audience demands answers, and we must give the audience what it has been searching for all these decades later, the answer to the question that’s been on everyone’s lips: What would it be like if Dianne Wiest did an impression of Ruth Gordon?
Apartment 7A stars the luminous Julia Garner as Terry, a New York City dancer who succumbs to a devastating ankle injury during one fateful show. The injury heals but leaves Terry with a slight limp, unable to perform properly and subsequently canned from most auditions. Struggling to pay her rent and on the bad side of an intolerant roommate, she follows one such dismissive theater director home to his apartment at the Bramford, hoping to persuade her way into Alan Marchand’s (Jim Sturgess) Broadway show, one way or another.
Of course, who should she happen to meet there instead but the kindly Minnie and Roman Castevet (Wiest and Kevin McNally). But the original performances by Ruth Gordon (who won an Oscar) and Sidney Blackmer are too iconic, forcing their new actors into doing mere impressions. Roman is a subdued enough character, and McNally looks similar to Blackmer. But Wiest’s vocal replication of Gordon’s shrill, melodramatic portrayal is accurate to the point of parody, and confusing partly because Wiest physically looks more like her character’s friend in Polanski’s film, Laura-Louise, played by Patsy Kelly (more confusingly, Wiest even wears spectacles similar to the Laura-Louise character).