Rosemary's Baby (1968) review

(9/10)

This great Satanic horror film was a great scare in its time and is still creepy today, as well as being brilliantly shot by Polanski and acted by Mia Farrow.

PLOT:Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband, actor Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes), have just moved into the Bramford, a fancy apartment bulding in New York with a bad past behind it. Right from when they start to socialize, they meet a nice young lady who lives with an old couple, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) Castevet, who seem overly nice for their type. One night, Minnie makes the couple a dessert that puts Rosemary to sleep, where she dreams of an inhuman being raping her around her acquaintances. She wakes up with questions, but everything seems to fade away. One day, as she has wished, Rosemary has become pregnant, seemingly by her husband. However, the baby causes her daily pain and everyone from the neighbors to the doctors that try to help seem to make it worse. She starts to get paranoid and reads certain books on the medicines they've given her and stumbles upon a strange connection to the Castavets with witchcraft. It's a brilliant plot executed very greatly.



ACTING:The performances in this film were very great and on-point with their character types. Mia Farrow does a brilliant job of performing the nice then paranoid Rosemary Woodhouse. The emotions she cast in her part were convincing and extremely believable. Everyone else did a great job, but she shined out the most. The other performances worth mentioning would be John Cassavetes as Guy Woodhouse, Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet, Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet, Maurice Evans as Hutch, and Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein.

SCORE:The score in this film was really good. The main theme of the film was very spooky and haunting yet light and relaxing at the same time. I really enjoyed it.



OTHER CONTENT:This film was very good at dragging you into the story and keeping you right up to emotion with Rosemary. When she felt paranoid, you did too. When she was horrified, you were too. Polanski makes this film so that these connections can be felt. This film was also extremely well shot. Each frame, from the "dream" scene to the first night in the house and even to the ending climax was shot with such precision and visionary direction that it came of as a very artful form. The only problem I had was that it took a really long time for suspense to build so that it really boiled on the story for a while, or didn't get anywhere too fast. It covered all aspects of the story and Rosemary's trouble quite accurately though. I also didn't like the ending in terms that we didn't get to see the final outcome of Rosemary's child. I'm sure that made audiences everywhere mad at the time.

OVERALL,an awesome Satanic horror with a brilliant plot, very great acting, haunting score, emotional connections, and very well shot moments, but the suspense was really slow to build and it felt a little overlong.