One of the scariest films ever

Rating: Null/10 (27 February 2003)

There are spoilers in this review.
Rosemary's Baby sits on the cusp of changing Hollywood filmmaking; abandoning the corny westerns and drawing-room banter of 1950s films that basically mimic stage performances, it explodes into the 1960s like some crazy psychedelic dream. The Miracle Worker, The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke: the 1960s were a movie renaissance for the American public. It must have been a very exciting time if you were a moviegoer, and Rosemary's Baby belongs in the same vein of exciting films.
Where do I begin? The fundamental strength of this film is its believability, and it accomplishes it with flow. This film effortlessly captures the natural flow between man and wife, in a way that no film prior to it ever did. Cassavettes's smoldering expression and smoky observations as Guy play so easily against Farrow's waifish, wide-eyed Rosemary that it's easy to imagine they might have been married in real life. It is so easy to see these people as real characters, because we are given their strengths and faults, we see them quarrelling and kissing, just like real life. It is this strength of reality that pulls along the rest of the film; when things turn unreal, that's when the real terror begins. Polanski brilliantly takes this sense of unreality to the limit.
Polanski's genius lies in taking Hollywood cliches and putting a contemporary spin on them: witches no longer wear long black clothes and pointy hats, they are an annoying old woman and a pie-faced old man living in a run-down gothic apartment building in New York. The creepy Dakota apartment building is the iconic haunted house of everyone's collective subconscious, brought into contemporary 1960s city living. The building is at first serene but becomes more sinister as the film progresses. Guy and Rosemary renovate their new flat, brightening it with gallons of white paint and pre-Martha Stewart white linens, but like MS herself, there is something odd lingering underneath the surface.
Ruth Gordon steals the movie. She nails the part of Minnie Castevet with such self-assured manic demeanor that it is difficult to imagine anyone else in the role. She gleefully destroys the cliche of the Halloween-style Margaret Hamilton witch, and instead gives us a witch who looks like a train wreck. Dressed like a clown with too much makeup, forcing her nutrition drinks down Rosemary's throat, barging into Rosemary's apartment, displaying terrible table manners, and doing her best to meddle in every detail of Rosemary's life, she is at once annoying and fascinating; who would ever think a witch could actually be irritating?
By the end of the film, Cassavettes's ambitious actor Guy Woodhouse is a pathetic, soulless automaton, clearly the film's villain for selling his wife's body to the witches in order to advance his career. His deception is laid bare for all the world to see, and made all the more abject with his inability to see anything wrong with the unholy agreement. I wonder how many other actors would do the same thing.
There is more fear in the unknown than in the known; special effects can only do so much to capture the fear that we all share, but Rosemary's Baby, much like the Exorcist and the Blair Witch Project, uses huge doses of suggestion rather than relying solely on special effects. The truly frightening things are left to the imagination, for instance when Rosemary looks at the baby and shrieks `What have you done to his eyes?', we don't need to see them, we know they're frightening because of her reaction.

After watching this film, it's easy to see where The Exorcist gained most of its inspiration, although Rosemary's European director gives us an ending that is perfectly chilling and uncompromisingly pessimistic, while the Exorcist continues as though nothing ever happened.
This is a must-see film.