Hell is other people

Rating: 8/10 (14 May 2018)

If there were ever a film that conveyed just about everything we'd like to leave behind from the 1960s, it's Rosemary's Baby. Discussed in furtive, worried whispers by older generations, and the 'can we watch it?' controversy in the wake of director Roman Polanski's legendary sexual scandal, the film has, through the decades, become enshrouded with the sort of titillating rebellious intrigue of sneaking into an R-rated movie under-age. The final product is hardly what you'd expect: a creeping psychological thriller that leaves most of its horror tropes offscreen, Polanski's film is more of an uncompromisingly caustic social satire, and is all the scarier for it.
It's a horror movie more in terms of gender politics than Satanic shenanigans, replete with some of cinema's most grotesque gaslighting, sleep-rape (distressingly laughed off in a further feat of 'oh the '60s' predatory patriarchy), and effective spousal prostitution, made all the ickier by the predatory shroud of its director. Scene by scene, flustered, passive Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is practically passed around like an eponymous joint by her vain, controlling actor husband (the sickeningly charming John Cassavetes), and their intrusively extroverted upstairs neighbours (the show-stealing, boorishly hysterical Ruth Gordon, gleefully stretching her syllables like a Looney Tunes character, and the pleasantly measured Sidney Blackmer), near-speechless as they backseat drive her social outings, sex life, home decor, fashion, food and drink consumption, and, particularly pregnancy.* When Rosemary makes one decidedly autonomous action, coming home with a trendy pixie cut, she's jokingly chided as irresponsibly impulsive, and unattractively boyish. Farrow is superb, commanding each scene with such an off-kilter, cheery charm that it's heartbreaking to see it inevitably extinguished, and perfectly essaying Rosemary's descent from her initial demure passivity into manic, bug-eyed, knife-wielding frenzy. It's tempting to write the film off as Polanski's patriarchal posturing, were it not for his subtly satirical undercurrent of critique. He drinks in each social faux-pas with a grotesque lack of hyperbole, colouring them as unforgivable (but, also, uncomfortably culturally common) with the wryest, jet-black sense of humour. Rosemary's Baby is, in essence, less a tale of the Antichrist than a scathing condemnation of the hellish people already inhabiting the planet.

It's also effectively spooky, albeit predicated more on a (slightly less contemporary) steadily creeping sense of dread, with jump scares less common than surrealist dream sequences and teasingly vague political and religious critiques ensconced in acid trip sexual fantasies. Proceedings begin with an almost eerily sluggish pace, but Polanski mounts tension with Hitchcockian dedication (albeit with a touch less poise), playing each almost imperceptible sound and dialogue from the adjacent apartment as a source of ambiguously immeasurable threat. He's so singularly committed to snowballing into the film's fatalistic climax that it's easy to forget the film's airy, bourgeois openings in the thick of the frenzied, nail-biting suspense that comes.
Still, Polanski's cruellest joke is transforming us, the viewer, into the proverbial Judas, where we nearly start to turn on Rosemary as well. Polanski's taut editing and clever script keep things so teasingly ambiguous that we're (nearly) coerced into joining in the film's satirically antifeminist bent, anticipating all of the cultist conspiracy, lies, and murder turn out to be a product of her paranoiac overactive imagination - or worse: hysteria, or a bout of prepartum psychosis. The real twist? Things are exactly as they seem, delivering an unforgettably climax primed with chilling gothic fervour, and the darkest of humour - none moreso than in the final, haunting shot of Farrow's sphinx-like smile.
Time is less kind to Rosemary's Baby than other films of its ilk, as the garish sexual politics, benign scare tactics and initial snail's pace all war for the most antiquated of attributes. What is, sadly, timeless is the film's searing critical commentary of the beastliness of people, from the imbedded micromanagement of women's actions and behaviours, to the dark depths that people will stoop in the name of personal gratification. In terms of cinematic mission statement, Polanski seems to draw as much from the Bard as from novelist Ira Levin: "Hell is open, and all the devils are here!"
-8/10

*In a feat of appropriately poetic grotesquery, this review was written on Mother's Day. Go figure...