Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Rosemary's Baby(1968)


This movie is based on the novel of the same name written by Ira Levin. It is directed by Roman Polanski who also directed Frantic and The Tenant. It stars Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.The movie focuses on a young housewife, Rosemary Woodhouse(Farrow) who is living with her husband, Guy(Cassavetes) in an apartment in New York City. The building has a reputation for having bad neighbours and strange things happening. There is an old couple living next door, Minne and Roman Castevet, who become very friendly with Guy. Rosemary tries to keep her distance from them as she doesn't like them much. Guy is an actor and he gets a good role all of a sudden. Guy and Rosemary decide to have a baby and they plan to conceive soon. One night, when they plan to try for the baby, the nosy neighbour brings them over some dessert and Rosemary eats some , but finds that it has a strange taste and throws it out. She finds that she becomes dizzy after it and passes out and has a weird dream about being raped by some monster. She becomes pregnant and she plans to attend her doctor when the weird couple suggest another doctor for her. She has a lot of problems with her pregnancy and she gets pains and craves weird stuff. The new doctor tells her that it is nothing to worry about. She meets an old friend and he is is worried by her appearance and he researches it but is mysteriously taken ill and dies before anyone else finds out. He manages to get a friend of his to deliver a book on witchcraft to Rosemary before he is dead. She reads the book and she realises that the couple next door are part of some evil cult and they want her baby. She begins to suspect that Guy is in cohorts with them too. She tries to tell her old doctor all about this, but he thinks that she is imagining it all and he gets Guy to take her home. She goes into labour and when she awakens afterwards, she is told that her baby has died after birth. She wonders if her baby is really dead and she begins to hear a baby crying in the building. She finds a door leading into her neighbour's apartment and there she finds all of the coven together. They are worshipping her baby, the son of Satan. She thinks about killing the baby but she is convinced not to by Roman and instead, she begins to hum a lullaby to the child. This movie was chilling and ahead of its time. It is creepy and well- made. I am going to give it an 8/10.

2 comments:

Sci-Fi Gene said...

Absolute classic and extremely disturbing, particularly the ending - ideally should always be screened along with another classic Ira Levin adaptation, the original Stepford Wives.

Amanda said...

i liked the stepford wives too and i may do a post on that in the future. by the way has anyone seen the remake of the stepford wives with nicole kidman? it sucked big time!

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