Do you remember Terry Gionoffrio, the bright, smiling young woman who Rosemary Woodhouse meets in the basement laundry room early in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)? You know, the one who is staying with her neighbors, the Castevets, whose virtues she beamingly extols before winding up dead on the sidewalk a few scenes later, having apparently committed suicide by plunging out a window? Have you ever wondered who that young woman was and how she came to die in that manner?

The answer is “probably not” because, in Polanski’s masterpiece, Terry serves exactly the purpose she needs to serve: introducing the Castevets, foreshadowing their relationship with Rosemary, and instigating an early note of dread that lingers over the rest of the film. The details are unimportant.

Yet, here we are, 56 years later, with Apartment 7A, a late-in-coming prequel to Rosemary’s Baby that answers all of the questions no one was asking. The fact that it does so with slick, stylish aplomb and a few scenes that work with genuine horror does not negate the film’s fundamental lack of necessity. Apartment 7A is not unique in this manner, as there has long been an incessant trend in which filmmakers insist on creating prequels to well-known horror films that in various ways “explain” the horrors of their superior predecessors. Thus, we learned the details of Father Merrin’s spiritual battles in two competing Exorcist prequels in 2004, that Leatherface was born on a slaughterhouse floor in Texas Chainsaw: The Beginning (2006), that Michael Myers was a brooding and abused psycho-adolescent in Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), and that Hannibal Lecter watched Nazis eat his sister in Hannibal Rising (2007). While these films filled in gaps, they also evaporated mystery and intrigue. Sometimes, ambiguity is better.

Alas, there is no ambiguity in Apartment 7A, as director and co-writer Natalie Erika James uses the prequel as both an opportunity to expand on the implied story at the margins of Rosemary’s Baby and also to essentially remake that film’s greatest moments. The best prequels (and sequels) are the ones that take us in unexpected directions and surprise us with things we didn’t know we wanted to know. The screenplay by James and Christian White (who co-wrote James’s previous feature, 2020’s Relic) from an earlier draft by newcomer Skylar James feels almost dutybound to trot out all the familiar characters from Polanski’s film, run us through the same general plotline (right down to the main character cutting her long hair short), and confirm that there is really nothing new to say here. Did they not know that Rosemary’s Baby had already been remade back in 2014 as a television mini-series?

Julia Garner, who was so impressive in her chameleonic performance as the con artist Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna (2022), plays Terry as a determined young woman who has long set her sights on becoming a Broadway star, which establishes her own ambition as the source of her betrayal, rather than a scheming man (although there is one of those, too). In the film’s overdetermined opening scene, we see her break her ankle while dancing in the chorus line in Kiss Me, Kate, which makes it all but impossible for her to succeed on the stage (her limp is like a professional/artistic scarlet letter she wears with shame). Addicted to pain killers in a feeble attempt to keep going, she collapses on the street outside of a Manhattan apartment building, where she is rescued by Minnie and Roman Casetevet (Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally), who we already know hide their manipulative Satan worshipping behind a veneer of brightly colored, doddery-old New York eccentricity. As we all know will happen, they take Terry in and treat her like a prodigal daughter, but only because they want her womb for Satan’s offspring. They lure her with Broadway success, which hinges on their neighbor, a theatre producer named Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess), who is overseeing the new Broadway show Terry so desperately wants to be in (which turns out to be the least likely Broadway production since Satan’s Alley in Sylvester Stallone’s much derided Staying Alive).

From there, the plot goes pretty much exactly where you expect it to go, although James often treats it as though there is some kind of surprise lurking around the corner. Because this is 2024 instead of 1968, audiences expect a lot more visual horror, so Apartment 7A forgoes the immaculate restraint that Polanski practiced so intensely, instead pummeling us every 10 minutes or so with some of kind of horrific dream sequence, vision, or devilish freakout. Some of the imagery is admittedly effective, and James does resist the urge to linger too long on any one thing, instead giving us quick flashes and glances of the supernatural horrors that surround poor Terry. Unlike Rosemary’s Baby, which kept open the idea right up until the very end that it was all in Rosemary’s head, we know what is happening to Terry and what everyone around her is doing, including the Castevets, which robs them if their satirical menace. Filling Ruth Gordon’s shoes is no small feat, and Dianne Wiest’s does it admirably, although she is forced to be more overtly threatening, which is something that Ruth Gordon’s Minnie never did (even when everything was revealed at the end, she was more concerned with a stain on the carpet than casting ominous glares). Wiest is good, but her character is profoundly less interesting because there is no mystery, which is the fundamental flaw of the film itself.

Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

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