Film Review || Rosemary's Baby (1968)

fig 1.

Rosemary's Baby isn't this; a generic run-of-the-mill horror like you'd expect, rather it approaches as a pure creepy film, directed by Roman Polanski, a director who is known best for his female psychological horrors. Events silently circle around the lives of budding couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband 'Guy' (John Cassavetes) who find themselves at the center of mysterious goings on after moving into their new home in New York city. After a relatively short stay the husband proposes that they have a baby, bringing the advancing weeks to get progressively worse. What follows only describes the things to avoid as a pregnant woman, involving dubious concoctions of drink made by an unfamiliar doctor, and a hidden satanic cult behind the whole shebang.

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Themes within the film are very relevant to what happens with the plot, especially when related to the main character Rosemary, as it is indicated by flashbacks that she had a strong christian upbringing in her backstory. She is as a character particularly susceptible to the effects that a satanic cult could bring into her life. It could stand to show how intense conflict can really be when introduced into domestic situations, as previously shown in other Polanski works involving female psychological horror like Repulsion (1965), and his other film The Tenant (1976). 'In darkness, knowing is both tactile and a mystical transmission of the conceptual world.'  (Moore) Nowadays the ideas of female domestication or housewifery seems a bit far off, but at the time this sort of content would have been a very effective horror to women living in America during the 1960's.

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Beyond these themes there are also ways of pacing the story and setting the tone that brings everything together quite well in the editing. While for the most part there does not look to be much happening on screen, the plot builds darkness on the down-low, giving the audience plenty of time to marinate their minds in the meantime alongside Rosemary's until its twisted ending. 'Polanski deliberately presented the film with enough ambiguity so that the viewer is never quite certain whether Rosemary's experiences are truly supernatural or just fabricated, imaginative hallucinations.' (Dirks) It's a respectable thing to have a film that isn't so fast paced in favour of focusing more on building on the overall creepiness.

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This film has an unusual way of handling itself, which others of its kind don't usually do. It has become somewhat of a trope to have horror films end on an uneasy note, as if the troubles that played out will never really end. More recently endings have been performed using a jump-scare, which really is not necessary, and is almost expected in most horror films at this point in time, '...work revealed how dynamic genres are, how they continually change, modulate, and redefine themselves; genre emerges as the product of a three-way negotiation between audiences, film-makers and film producers' (Turner) which in turn really detracts from its overall shock factor because that's what has become expected of the genre. 

Whining aside Rosemary's Baby is a good new perspective for people getting interested in the more advanced side of horror, especially for those who value good quality story despite the genre. 


Bibliography
Dirks, Tim. "Rosemary's Baby (1968)". Filmsite.org. AMC Network Entertainment LLC., 2015. Web. 4 Apr. 2017. http://www.filmsite.org/rosem4.html
Turner, Graeme. Film As Social Practise. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Moore, Rachel. Savage Theory: Cinema As Modern Magic. 1st ed. London: Duke University Press, 2000. Print.

Figures
Polanski, R. (1968). Rosemary's Baby. [poster] [04/04/2017]
Polanski, R. (1968). Rosemary's Baby. [still] [04/04/2017]
Polanski, R. (1968). Rosemary's Baby. [still] [04/04/2017]
Polanski, R. (1968). Rosemary's Baby. [still] [04/04/2017]