They're out to get you after all (possible spoilers)

Rating: 9/10 (29 October 2000)

Roman Polanski's garishly satirical adaptation of Ira Levin's potboiler still works as effectively as a discomforting thriller as it does as a surrealist re-presentation of Faust in New York, with Cassavetes (a weak performance) trading his wife's womb for success and upward mobility. Farrow is the frail, white-bread owner of the uterus in question, and after getting the appalling visual joke of Rosemary conversing with the Pope while being raped by the devil out of the way, settles in on her gradual consumption by the living symbol of the corruption of her marriage by the values of a complacent and crotchety bunch of geriatric satanists, primarily in the form of Ruth Gordon's crassly intrusive Minnie.
Farrow, looking painfully small in the middle of the grotesques, suffers evocatively throughout the protacted running time, as her sense of displacement becomes brutally clear, while Levin's less delicate theme (the wife as pawn in the attempts of a man to achieve prestige, later to be reintroduced to similarly devastating effect in The Stepford Wives) becomes subordinated to Polanski's chilling representation of alienation and the inherently corrupt nature of traditional values. The final joke -- the eponymous baby -- is one of the most devastatingly delivered in cinema.