Horror and Suspense, Not Scares

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2014)

A gorgeous piece of sustained suspense filmmaking. Polanski is leisurely in his pacing and camera-work, with long takes and assured movement. Focusing on the environment, the use of sight and sound, and the performances, to build the story. It's really just a perfect movie. There isn't a wasted shot, nor clunky editing, nor melodrama to be found.
Mia Farrow is perfect as the fragile waif Rosemary, and John Cassavetes does a lot with a role that is intentionally underwritten. He sells everything Guy is going through by sheer force of acting will. Ruth Gordon, who won a hard to contest Oscar, and Sidney Blackmer play the nosey old couple next door to sublime exactness.
Not so much a horror movie, as a story that contains horror elements, although there are moments of terror to be found. Used sparingly and as a result, effectively. Mia's rape scene, with its use of hallucinogenic scenery and flashes of Satan is chilling in its implications. Rosemary's reaction to her first sight of the baby is blood-curdling. But maybe what's most scary is the choice she makes to end the movie. These help the movie to get under your skin, so much so that by the film's climax you don't realize how much stress you've been put under. The movie conveys the paranoia and lonesomeness of Rosemary without drawing attention to itself.
There are plenty of themes explored here. It was 1968, at the height of women's lib and Rosemary is a dependent who has shunned both God and family to get to where she is. She has no sense of self, really, outside of Guy. Her haircut, and then her baby become these things. Is she being punished for not being more independent? Was that her birth by fire into modern womanhood? There's paranoia and xenophobia, about the people next door, the people you think you know (but do you?) and the "old ways" all set within one of the most populated cities on the planet, and yet a person can still feel all alone.
A great movie, a great story, doesn't have to be about any one of those themes, but it's all there for the taking. It's small pricklings of common human thinking and modern anxieties that can help fuel the subtext of a good story well told.