Rosemary's Baby

Spoilers 

1968's ROSEMARY'S BABY is one of the most vivid and assured nightmares ever committed to celluloid.  A study in paranoia that confirmed director Roman Polanski's talents, which engineers tension and suspense without allowing his actors to succumb to ham fat or to spike the decibel meter.  At least until that celebrated climax.  Even then the director, who faithfully adapted Ira Levin's occult novel maintains perfectly modulated dread.  It's a horror by many definitions, and succeeds on all counts. 

Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) Woodhouse are a young couple who decide to rent a unit in a neo-Renaissance apartment building in Manhattan.  A place with a dark history, and where the previous tenant in their flat had recently died.  Things look ominous when a young woman is found dead on the sidewalk.  The one Rosemary had just met in the laundry room shortly before.  The woman had been staying with the elderly couple next door: Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) Castevet, who invite the Woodhouses over for dinner. 

Rosemary thinks of them as overbearing busybodies.  Guy is strangely fascinated and begins visiting them often.  His stalled acting career will gain momentum soon after.  The couple decide to try for a baby.  But on the special night, Rosemary becomes dizzy after consuming chocolate mousse prepared by Minnie.  She'll pass out and dream she is raped by a demon.  While it happens, she begins to believe she is not dreaming.  In the morning, Guy will admit to having his way while she was unconscious.  "It was fun in a necrophile kind of way" he jokes. 

Rosemary becomes pregnant.  Her suspicions that all is not kosher with the Castavets, her gynecologist Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), and maybe even her own husband grow.   As does viewer discomfort.  With each realization, we share Rosemary's awful suspicions and fears.  Fears of an evil conspiracy.  Polanski and editors Sam O'Steen and Bob Wyman orchestrate a surefooted odyssey certain to lead somewhere bleak and despairing.  Most reading this already know where and what.  Even having such foreknowledge does not lessen the impact.

The actors are excellent.  Farrow portrays fragility in a heartbreaking turn.  Cassavetes may be the most odious character of all, a placater and gaslighter that should make you sick to your soul.  Gordon does her familiar crotchety old lady thing with that particular rate of speech.  Her alleged innocence also quite unnerving.  Ditto for Blackmer and even Charles Grodin as Rosemary's first gynecologist, the son of a bitch. 

ROSEMARY'S BABY can easily be interpreted as a lament for women's rights.  The right to choose what one will do with her own body.  Rosemary will refuse an abortion even after months of intense abdominal pain and weight loss.   By the end, even after she sees the terrifying eyes of her offspring, realizing what in fact has happened and at whose hands, she will finally accept her child.  Does this mean that love conquers evil? Or that Satan won after all?