Product: Rosemary's Baby (El Bebe de Rosemary) [ NON-USA FORMAT, NTSC, Reg.4 Import - Latin America ] (1968)
Rating: 5.0
Best of its kind...
but what kind would that exactly be? Horror, obviously, but amazing that no one has mentioned how well Roman Polanski mixes his urban horror with such brilliant ironic humor. A gleeful sadist, he seems to relish identifying true evil and still defy it, mock it, revel in it. This is far from a "straight" horror movie. If you watch it expecting to be scared out of your wits, you'll be disappointed (though there are some rather creepy parts). The pacing is excellent--it lets you get to know the characters, the dialogue is clever, the characterizations of all the leads is pitch-perfect...The best part (and the necessity of the length of the movie), is that Rosemary only gradually over time realizes what is happening to her: clues are liberally sprinkled throughout and there's an ever-present sense of dread that something bad is happening ("This is not a dream, this is really happening! "), and Rosemary, despite her suspicions, is powerless to do anything about it. Little by little, she finds that the people she trusts are eliminated and replaced by people that mean her harm. This, along with Mia Farrow's fantastic performance, creates one of the most sympathetic characters in the movies with Rosemary. This movie stays with you. Polanski suffuses most every picture he does with this dread and love of loss of control--life out of balance. I can't say enough about how good this film and much of Polanski's other work is.