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).
Seeing that Terry is so hard up, the ever-generous Castevets offer her a rent-free home in the spare apartment that they have just happened to have invested in in their building. Terry, desperate for a fresh start and eager to be close in proximity to Marchand, accepts their offer in spite of her friend Annie’s (Marli Siu) suspicion and in spite of an orphaned ballet shoe with a woman’s name etched inside found in Terry’s new wardrobe.
It all goes down like Rosemary’s Baby: Redux. We already know that the Castevets were trying to get Terry pregnant with the Devil’s baby. They gave her the little tannis root charm that Rosemary sees on Terry’s neck in the laundry room; the same charm that Rosemary will come to wear around her own neck. A similar sequence of events will have obviously occurred for Terry, too, albeit with less physical progress on the pregnancy.
So, Apartment 7A basically delivers a less-good version of Rosemary’s Baby, with some differences in narrative and a couple visual flourishes that evoke a better film. The scene in which Marchand drugs Terry and leads her to be raped by the devil, surrounded by the Bramford’s geriatrics (like how it goes in the original film), is visualized as a drug-induced dream sequence with creative set design and choreography. It’s a standout, original set piece in an otherwise rote, unremarkable film.
Someone interested in a Rosemary’s Baby prequel will likely have already seen the original and knows what becomes of poor Terry Gionoffrio. Co-writers James, Skylar James and Christian White try to imbue some stakes into Terry’s dancing career, which gets a second wind as Terry herself (rather than Rosemary’s stage actor husband, Guy) is able to reap the rewards of selling her body to the devil. Some conflict comes about when it becomes clear to the other dancers that Terry has offered her body in some way to director Marchand in order to get her in the chorus.
But again, most of the recognizable beats are hit, beats which play out much better in a film from 56 years ago, which is just as available on streaming as Apartment 7A. One of the more interesting wrinkles of this new film is Terry’s eagerness to get an abortion, being a single, aspiring actress with no interest yet in motherhood, unlike Rosemary Woodhouse. This parallels The First Omen’s pro-choice ideas earlier this year, as two legacy prequels repackage their themes about women’s oppression and bodily autonomy in a post-Roe country. Terry’s climactic choice to throw herself from the Castevets’ window now further serves as a bleak reminder of the lengths women will go to receive an abortion, ones that could lead to their deaths. It’s a timely reimagining, but The First Omen (which already takes heavily from Rosemary’s Baby), already showed us that these ideas can be bundled into something much more skillful and imaginative. If we’re going to get endlessly franchised into eternity, the least we can ask for are good films.
Director: Natalie Erika James
Writer: Natalie Erika James, Christian White, Skylar James
Starring: Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Jim Sturgess, Kevin McNally
Release Date: September 27, 2024 (Paramount+)
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.