Nowadays, this film is an anomaly--a scary movie that uses atmosphere and suggestion, instead of gore.

Rating: Null/10 (20 March 2003)

It's hard to discuss this film without using spoilers, so I'll get the non-spoiler part done first. Seeing this movie a few decades after my first viewing only confirms my high opinion of Polanski as a brilliant director. In an age when most directors seem to confuse gallons of stage blood and severed body parts with scariness, it's refreshing to be reminded that the most frightening movies need not resort to the grand guignol technique. This one does it with subtle suggestions and carefully crafted atmosphere, and the result is infinitely more effective than the confections in which hideously scarred maniacs take chain saws to shoals of nubile coeds, etc., etc., etc. The acting is quite good throughout: Farrow embodies vulnerable innocence, Cassavettes nails his role, and Ruth Gordon is sublime--was this the film that revitalized her career? It certainly deserved to be. But the star of this film, in terms of who makes the biggest contribution, is Polanski. The end result is a wonderfully evocative and chilling movie that works as well now as it did in the late 60s. (HERE COME THE SPOILERS---IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE FILM, STOP READING HERE) Leaving aside the question of why people, even in a fiction, would believably choose to be Satanists, the great virtue of this movie is the way in which it progresses by gradual steps from a kind of super-normality into a nightmare. Polanski's touches--the shadowy corners of the elaborate old apartment, a fragment of a faded note written by the former tenant, the illustrations in the book on witchcraft that Rosemary gets from the newly deceased "Hutch"--the contrast between the banal, everyday world around the Woodhouses and the horror Rosemary is slowly but inevitably sucked into...it all works. The whole, to my mind, is greater than the sum of its parts. I would say it can be called a genre classic.