I checked around, and unless somebody’s lying to me it seems nobody asked for there to be a straight-to-Paramount+ prequel to ROSEMARY’S BABY. But it’s okay – nobody asked for a prequel to THE OMEN, they did one anyway, and it was quite good. Sometimes there is still decency in the world, and sometimes in religious-themed horror late-prequels as well.
APARTMENT 7A is directed by Natalie Erika James (RELIC), screen story by Skylar James, screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James, and it’s technically a Platinum Dunes production because they tried to do a remake in 2008 but honorably bowed out when they couldn’t come up with a good concept. Eventually this new batch came up with the idea of telling the story of Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner, SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR), the young neighbor Rosemary talked to in the laundry room. You may remember that Terry later experienced a major, uh… event, portending bad things for Rosemary (and gaining her a new necklace).
Well, now we get to see what Terry was all about, or at least what this movie thinks Terry could’ve been all about. In this telling she’s a Broadway dancer who was on the rise until she bit it during a performance, snapping her ankle. Now not only does she have to deal with the injury, but she’s become infamous as “the girl who fell.” It comes up at a particularly sadistic audition where director Leo Watts (Andrew Buchan, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD) realizes where he recognizes her from and makes her do the fateful move over and over again until she slips.
Then he walks out but producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess, GEOSTORM) pushes it even further. She mentioned that her family runs a slaughterhouse in Nebraska, so he tells her to crawl on the floor like a pig. When she refuses he says, “Good for you.” One of those classic fucking asshole moves where they’re being a fucking asshole and then try to pass it off as a joke or a test or something. Go fuck yourself, Marchand.
But when somebody mans the gate to your dreams you can’t just tell them to go fuck theirself. In a fit of pain-pill-enhanced audacity, Terry follows Marchand home to the Bramford, and gets kicked out of the building but, as fate would have it, pukes on the curb in front of the Castevets, Minnie (Dianne Wiest, THE MULE) and Roman (Kevin McNally, LEGEND). Next thing you know they’re putting her up in the apartment next to theirs and acting like they’re her cool grandparents. “They’re just lonely old people looking for someone to rescue, and I am happy to play damsel in distress if it means living at the Bramford,” Terry tells her best friend Annie (Marli Siu, ANNA AND THE APOCALYPSE).
Minnie arranges for Terry to sit and have a drink with new neighbor Marchand at his apartment, a big career opportunity and uncomfortable situation. We’re aware of the horror movie and prequel reasons why this is bad news but also, of course, it reflects a situation many women, and specifically aspiring actresses, find themselves in. The lure of the opportunity forces her to dismiss all the red flags and think yeah, this seems iffy, but maybe it’s genuine, we’re just having a drink together, he thinks I have potential, I need to make a good impression. He acts charming and makes her an old fashioned and yep, he drugged it.
The difficult part about recommending this is that the most brilliant and disturbing scene, the obvious standout, is technically a rape scene. As in the first movie it’s indicated that she’s impregnated by a demon. It’s not graphic, but it’s the idea that’s upsetting, and that you catch yourself admiring the ingenious craft that goes into the scene. Terry tries to walk, but she’s getting wobbly. She’s disoriented, her surroundings blur and shift, and then Marchand puts a record on the turntable and all the sudden she’s in a dance number? Hands appear around her, they turn into dancers, she’s twirling and falling and being lifted. Garner (and her double?) perfectly straddle the line between dancerly and intoxicated, and it starts to look like she’s not even conscious at all, her body being carried and puppeted by these other dancers, an impressive choreographic achievement that perfectly conveys a horrible feeling of violation and lack of agency. And they put her on a table and she’s laying there and suddenly this… demon thing is at her feet. It’s covered in colorful, shiny jewels. At first I thought it was a bedazzled mask, like for an EYES WIDE SHUT party, but it covers the whole creature. The originality of the image makes it seem more authentically perverse than a more obvious monster, and the glamour of it ties it to the musicals she’s working so hard to get her start in. Her dreams in life morphing into occult nightmare.
Like the first film, it’s a story about manipulation and coercion. When she wakes up confused in the morning it’s easier to accept Marchand’s chorus line job offer than to confront and believe what she remembers from last night. Similarly, how can she say no to the Castevets when they provide her shelter? They find vulnerable people and give them something they need so they can extract something bigger out of them. I can think of multiple monsters from recent headlines who operate the same.
Just knowing she’s accepted the bargain is a degradation of its own. At rehearsals she’s immediately accused by a rival dancer (Rosy McEwen, VESPER) of sleeping her way into the job. Then when Marchand announces she’s taking over the lead you can feel the weight of her knowing what everybody thinks about it. But she takes it.
If you remember Terry in ROSEMARY’S BABY then you know this has a very specific end point. But so did TITANIC, and that was pretty good, I felt. Here I think they came up with a brilliant way to deal with the inevitability, having it go down not quite how we pictured and giving it a new meaning, a way for it to be a partial victory for Terry.
Many people seem to assume that the only reason for a prequel is to give us important information. What is there I needed to know about what happened before ROSEMARY’S BABY? Nothing, obviously, so if that’s what you want out of a movie, don’t watch this one, you’re waiting for a package that has not even been sent.
It would be one thing if they’d made a prequel a few years after the original, but doing it 50+ years later is entirely different. It means the challenge (and joy) of a period piece, re-creating the fashion, furniture, etc. of the era. Can modern actors convince us they exist in the 1960s, that they can speak and carry themselves like the people of the era? Can we accept their faces, their accents? Will that clash with modern film language and technology? I think they made it work.
Since they chose to tie the character to Broadway it also evokes a specific type of glamour that no longer exists. The myth of the small town girl trying to make it on Broadway, when it meant something different. Now it’s like, “I was a featured dancer in A Time To Kill and understudy to the monkey in Scopes.” Okay. Maybe you can parlay that into being a dance coach on a game show. Back then it was a pinnacle.
But since this period story deals with themes of women being preyed upon, including by a hot shit producer abusing his power in the industry, and women not being believed or knowing how to tell people what they’re going through, and it feels very natural to the time but also not drastically different from today, it makes the point that this shit is endless.
It’s also notable that there’s a scene in a seedy abortion clinic – pre-Roe troubles eyed from the beginning of the post-Roe world, joining THE FIRST OMEN, IMMACULATE and others in this wave of horror movies about the autonomy of women over their bodies and reproductive rights.
If those don’t seem like compelling enough reason to watch a prequel to ROSEMARY’S BABY, that’s fine. I’ll let you be on your way. I won’t socially pressure you like I’m Minnie Castevet or somebody. But personally I thought this was a solid use of the prequelizing opportunity. I’d almost recommend it just for the joy of seeing Dianne Wiest do a Ruth Gordon voice for an entire movie. But I’d say the real main event is our new Squirm Queen Julia Garner. I think I first saw her in Jim Mickle’s American version of WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, but I really became a fan after her two Kitty Green movies, THE ASSISTANT and THE ROYAL HOTEL. In both she plays an outwardly meek worker withstanding tsunamis of male disrespect and micro-to-severe-aggression. Here she combines that type of material with the horror genre she’s also excelled in. Plus she gets to dance!
When I finished watching APARTMENT 7A, Paramount+ bumped me right into ROSEMARY’S BABY. There have gotta be some young people out there somewhere who watched it because it was a new horror movie, not knowing it was a prequel, and then got nudged into double-featuring with the original. I like that.
Rewatching the original laundry room scene afterwards I really don’t think it matches up. It doesn’t make sense for her to be in the entertainment industry and not mention or imply it while fawning over Rosemary’s celebrity husband. Original Terry also just seems much more clueless than this one, and not as suspicious of the Castevets as she is at this point of the story in 7A. But it’s okay. It makes for a better movie. And anyway what it told us was true, from a certain point of view.
I kinda wish I could review the whole franchise, but there’s no video release of the 1976 tv sequel LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY’S BABY, directed Sam O’Steen, the editor of the first film. Ruth Gordon returned, Patty Duke played Rosemary, and Stephen McHattie starred as the adult version of the baby. I guess I’d also need to watch the 2014 four-hour NBC mini-series adapting the book and its sequel Son of Rosemary. That one was directed by Agnieszka Holland (EUROPA EUROPA), with Zoe Saldaña as Rosemary, and set in Paris. It got poor reviews, but not much worse than this, and I liked this. If someone offers you APARTMENT 7A, sign that lease!
note: If you don’t have Paramount+ or do VOD, APARTMENT 7A also came out on DVD, but I guess not blu-ray so far.
