A different twist on an old theme

Rating: 9/10 (20 June 2009)

The story is as old as time itself: a man sells his soul to the devil in order to attain the unattainable. One can argue that it's your soul and you can do what you want with it and then it's just you who has to suffer the consequences of your decision.
But what makes "Rosemary's Baby" so disturbing is that a man doesn't sell his own soul, he sells someone else's soul. Guy Woodhouse makes a pact with a coven of witches to have his wife become the mother of the devil's child and in return he becomes a success. He reaps the benefits of the deal he makes, yet it is his wife who suffers for it.
Rosemary tries to stop all the things that are happening to her but she is stymied at every turn; the witches' power and scope is too broad and far-reaching. She doesn't know who to trust. Anyone who tries to help her gets struck down. Her husband, who should be the one she can trust the most, turns out to be the one she should trust the least.
Once her baby is born she is initially repulsed by its appearance when she realizes who this child really is, but then the oh-so-strong maternal instinct takes over and she sees him only as her child, whom she loves, regardless. It makes you wonder if things might have been different had Rosemary been in on the plot all along.
Younger folks today will find all sorts of problems with the story: why didn't she just stop drinking that awful stuff? Why didn't she just go to the emergency room? It's easy to make these comments now, 40-some-odd years later, when we have patients' rights and privacy acts and information at our fingertips from webmd.com, but I can tell you that when this film first came out it was very scary.