Rosemary's Baby is a psychological horror flick directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, and Charles Grodin in his film debut.
Rosemary (Farrow) and her husband Guy (Cassavetes) move into an old house (now split up into apartments) in New York as he searches for work as an actor, despite their friend Hutch (Evans) insisting that the place has a history of murder and cannibalism and so on. Very early on, they meet their neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet (Gordon and Blackmer, respectively), who seem charming if intolerably nosy. Guy is quite taken with them, and soon after, his career picks up. He suggests that they have a baby, and Rosemary is all for it...
But then she gets drugged with chocolate mousse and raped by Satan while all of the tenants of the building, including Guy, watch, naked.
The rest of the film is Rosemary suffering through her pregnancy, desperately trying to cling to some sense of normalcy and reconnect with her pre-crazy building life, but the tenants (they're a cult, OK, it's pretty obvious) are always one step ahead of her. The famous doctor that they recommend, Sapirstein (Bellamy) is in on it, and even when Rosemary tries to flee to a real doctor (Grodin), he rats her out...because in fairness, she's talking about witches and people casting spells to kill people, which is objectively kind of delusional sounding.
In the end, Rosemary delivers her titular baby and it's implied that she'll act as a mother to the little monster, even though the cult makes it very clear that his role in the world is to overthrow God.
So! This movie has heaps of acclaim as a horror film, and it kinda deserves them. The story relies on some very uncomfortable ingrained misogyny (Rosemary wakes up after the "nightmare" of being Satan-raped, and her husband claims that he did it because he didn't want to miss "baby night," and she's upset but kind of takes it in strike), as well as the very poignant idea of folks in the medical profession not listening when women report pain. In addition, the depiction of the cultists is creepily on point - the only one who really radiates "Satanic worshipper" is Roman, because he's lustily yelling "Hail Satan!" But his wife, Minnie, remains a New York busybody right till the end (a fun moment was her picking up a knife that had embedded in the floor and frustratedly rubbing at the mark it made before going back to the cult stuff).
The nightmare scene is also really well done; Rosemary doesn't eat much of the poisoned mousse and so is partially conscious throughout, but still sees things as though in a dream (including the Pope and other folks talking about how she was "bitten by a mouse" - "mouse" being how Minnie pronounces "mousse"). It nicely captures the feel of a nightmare, and on a first view it's hard to know how much is really happening, which makes us feel for Rosemary.
With that said, there's no point in the movie, in my opinion, that we're supposed to feel like this isn't really happening and Rosemary is just ill, especially because when she does connect with folks outside the building, they usually believe and support her. That makes it all the more tragic when her last outreach to safety fails and she gets dragged back into the building.
The other thing I want to note is that John Cassavetes has the remarkable ability to out-creep himself multiple times over the course of the movie, which is damned impressive, considering.
My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
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