After viewing films from all over his career, I've come to the conclusion that, as interesting and engaging as his movies usually are, Roman Polanski is just flat-out inconsistent. Not only throughout his filmography but within each of the stories he chooses to place on the screen. There is a boisterousness to his actor's dialogue and a quick-turn happenstance to his pacing always present, which either pushes the material to greater, stylistic heights or forces it down into the bowels of contrivance.
Rosemary's Baby shares these qualities, but does it succeed or fail in their execution? The answer is that it rolls into a bit of both. The film is seen as one of the pinnacle classics of horror cinema, and to a point, I can totally understand why. Above all, it is a completely unique horror experience as far as the top-billed in the genre go. The film follows Rosemary, a yuppie looking to have a child with her husband, as they move into a strange apartment. The neighbors take a peculiar interest in Rosemary, supporting her desire for children and offering their bedside care to her. However, as her baby develops she finds herself subject to increasingly destructive treatment from those that supposedly look after her.
It's a premise that could easily be thrown into a tacky "look how weird and fucked up this is" aesthetic, but supernatural evil and grotesque shock take a far backseat to clinical mystery. Rosemary's slow unfolding of a plot against her and the child she's expecting seems like an after-thought to the social observations on manners and passive aggressive expectation in the film. Polanski creates his brand of tension by suffocating characters with guilt and repression, Rosemary taking the brunt of expectation as the mother-to-be.
The sinister forces at work are very pedestrian and slice-of-life, like the herbal drink that Rosemary's neighbor gives to her throughout her pregnancy. The drink seems to cause her great pain, makes her pale and sickly, and eventually she starts to suspect something is wrong. Everyone tells her to ride it out, ignoring her plight and calling her crazy for thinking otherwise. This "harm through hospitality" makes the disturbance in the film much more effective. It's an interesting critique of social politeness at all costs, showing the lengths some people will go to in order to maintain the status quo.
The elements of witchcraft and satanism are downplayed to the point of subconscious needling, nagging at your senses and only occasionally throwing it all in your face. There are only a handful of dream sequences that outwardly depict the anxieties of Rosemary, one being a hallucination induced by her being drugged. This particular nightmare sequence is the cream core of the film, as Rosemary is implicitly raped by her husband and first makes the realization that something is amiss with the neighbors in her apartment.
The sequence features intense chanting and brooding strings that hover over shadowy naked old people (including her neighbors) and Rosemary tied down to a satin bed. It's one of those unforgettable film moments where there is a full-bodied humor and grotesque subversion in equal portion. The nightmare could have been made in an aggressive, gross-out fashion, but Polanski keeps in all the awkward nuances. The image of the old people standing around her bed, watching and waiting, is burned in your mind, not because it got scared into you, but because you genuinely didn't know what the fuck to think of it.
Mia Farrow's portrayal of Rosemary unfortunately has remnants of the old acting school elocution. I could see a genuine performance wanting to crawl out of her, but she remains fastened to the overly proper mannerisms and dialogue articulation found in Hollywood films of the '40s, '50s and early '60s. The time context becomes less of an adequate excuse considering that the movie was released in 1968, from a filmmaker known for stylistically alternative acting direction, and the counterculture film movement being in full swing. However, Ruth Gordon as the nosy, overbearing neighbor Minnie, was pitch perfect. It's clear she's supposed to be a caricature of a New York Jew, but she plays it with a nice tussle between ostentatious clown, dry villain and stern nurse.
Like with many of Polanski's films, Rosemary's Baby goes on for slightly too long (even though the ending is well done), attempting to throw a few extra twists in for good measure. An example is the portion where Rosemary seeks consolation in her first OBGYN, after being subjected to malpractice from another doctor that's in collaboration with the apartment neighbors. She finds out that this first doctor is ALSO under the sway of the neighbors, thwarting her plans to escape their clutches. It's a section that is far-fetched and unnecessary, it doesn't give any new context to what's going on in the story, it doesn't heighten the tension or provide a stylistic eccentricity worth watching. It's just extra fat. I couldn't help but feel that if the film was 20 minutes shorter, it could have been more succinct and powerful. The tension could still be built adequately but there would be no room for flat twists that just turn into posturing.
So, on the positive side, Rosemary's Baby is a good-looking horror film that doesn't play by any of the rules setup in the genre. I've always wished more horror movies explored the slow, passive aggressive crawl of disturbance over shock and slash thrills, but the truth is the former is much harder to pull off than the latter. On the negative side, Polanski's penchant for dragging out his narratives and Farrow's fluffy, somewhat artificial performance hold the film back from any true greatness in my mind. It's a film that is absolutely worth watching, but one that needs to be taken with grain of salt.
