Product: Rosemary's Baby (El Bebe de Rosemary) [ NON-USA FORMAT, NTSC, Reg.4 Import - Latin America ] (1968)
Rating: 5.0
Best horror of all time
Rosemary's Baby is about the real horror of the irruption of the world of dreams into waking consciousness:" This is no dream.This is really happening!"Polanski is great at dramatising the paranoid sense of neighbours(cf.The Tenant) as a malign audience,voyeuristically watching,judging disgustedly and wishing one no good.The film depicts the relentlessly sinister fusion of pregnancy,religion and psychological manipulation by elderly male authority figures.This set the template for horror films along with Psycho and Night of the Living Dead for 2 decades.Mia Farrow is brilliant as Rosemary,her impulsive decision to crop her hair making her more child-like at the most vulnerable time of her life.Taking over a gloomy flat in the gothic Bramford Building,she transforms its oppressive interior into a bright yellow-and-cream cocoon,its décor so pale that when Guy her husband(Cassevettes)buys a bouquet of red roses,she finds the abrupt redness as overbearing as her inexplicably sinister neighbours' constant, deeply unwanted attention.The film is filled with similarly unsettling details:the lift that doesn't quite become level with the outer floor,the head-shot of an empty door-frame as something petrifying.This stands up remarkably well.