Something Wiccan This Way Comes.

Rating: 7/10 (29 November 2007)

The recently deceased Ira Levin was an estimable writer of commercial entertainments, with enough role distance to be able to make jokes about his own work. Like Stephen King, he larded his pages with references to consumer products and familiar names. In the novel Victoria Gionoffrio looked exactly like Audrey Hepburn, not some fictional actress.
Here, Levin has written an almost perfect woman-in-jeopardy film that, had it not had the performers, director, and production values of a feature film, would have fit neatly into the sort of template that leaps out at a view from an LMN movie. "Where's my BABY?", Rosemary Woodhouse screams towards the end.
Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and husband Guy (John Cassavetes), an upwardly mobile young couple in New York, rent an apartment in a building haunted by its violent and mysterious past. Guy is an actor, limited to unimportant roles, until his rival for an important part is suddenly struck blind and Guy gets the part he's been praying for. His turn of fortune may have had something to do with their somewhat odd but unpretentious neighbors, especially the Castavets, Sidney Blackmer and the amusingly dotty Ruth Gordon. In fact, as it develops, his good luck owed everything to them. Cassavetes has achieved his goal by selling his wife as a vehicle for the conception, gestation, and birth of the child of Satan. The pregnancy is really bizarre too, involving magic potions prepared by Gordon, and the conniving of a celebrity Ob-Gyn doc (Ralph Bellamy) who is in on the plot.
Mia Farrow gradually twigs to the plan and tries to escape, but her every attempt is blocked. We want things to turn out well for her and her baby, of course, but, as is usual with Roman Polanski, the ending is sad. More than sad, actually. "The son of Satan is born and will lay waste to the world!" shouts an ecstatic Blackmer. Right. The formula calls for a perceptive young man who is a friend, hopelessly in love with Farrow, to catch on and come to her rescue at the last minute, sort of like Hutch (Maurice Evans), but it doesn't happen here.
The movie is about as well done as these horror fantasies get. All of the principle actors are splendid. And nobody could have embodied the threatened mother-to-be better than the waif-like Mia Farrow. She's skinny and beautiful to begin with. But as her pregnancy progresses and she suffers severe and continuous pain, and after she has a prison haircut, and after she loses still more weight, she becomes positively hebemorphic and afflicted with raccoon eyes. The fetus may be flourishing but she looks as if she's about to waste away to nothing. She wobbles as she walks, looking barely able to hold herself upright.
Polanski's direction is impeccable and so is the production design. And we have to mention the wardrobe department too. No one with more hideous outfits than Ruth Gordon's has been on the screen for a generation before and after the release of this movie. I guess there is one weak scene. In desperation, Farrow visits her original obstetrician (Charles Grodin) and tells him about her entrapment. But, in a scene that we remember from dozens of similar movies, she tries to spill the beans to the attentive Grodin all at once, and the information comes out stumbling all over itself, pile upon pile of non sequiturs and paranoid-sounding arguments. She doesn't sound trapped. She sounds nuts.
Anyway, a good job by all concerned