If “prequel to a traditional film concerning the delivery of the Antichrist” feels like one thing you’ve already encountered this 12 months, you’re not possessed: again in April, The First Omen delivered a gruesomely inventive exploration of occasions main into The Omen. Apartment 7A endeavors to do the identical for Rosemary’s Baby, and whereas its story presents fewer shocks than The First Omen, it’s nonetheless a thoughtfully thought-about prequel anchored by an intriguing viewpoint.
Impressed by Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and Roman Polanski’s 1968 movie, Residence 7A was co-written and directed by Natalie Erika James, who additionally made 2020’s Relic—the story of three generations of girls grappling with a creepy presence of their household dwelling. One other sinister dwelling takes middle stage in Residence 7A, and Rosemary’s Child followers realize it properly: the Bramford, a once-elegant New York Metropolis residence constructing whose growing older partitions conceal a coven of equally growing older Satanic witches.
The brand new movie’s manufacturing design pays shut consideration to element, and whereas the setting feels genuine, it’s not aiming to precisely copy Polanski’s model. There are key components that carry over, nonetheless, together with these very skinny partition partitions that permit raised voices and the haunting piano notes of “Für Elise” to waft between models.
Into this towering pile of darkish wooden, yellow lighting, and birdcage elevators stumbles Terry Gionoffrio, a personality who elements into the primary quarter-hour of Rosemary’s Child. Residence 7A takes us again a 12 months or so earlier; it’s 1965, and Terry is simply beginning a promising dance profession when she suffers an agonizing harm. Julia Garner (Ozark, subsequent 12 months’s The Unbelievable 4: First Steps) brings a vulnerability to her model of Terry. You’re feeling her frustration as she faces not simply cash woes, audition rejections, and a worrisome dependence on painkillers, but additionally the insufferable feeling that the targets she’s been obsessively pursuing are slipping away.
In that headspace, you perceive why she may make some choices she in any other case wouldn’t, like accepting a free place to dwell from Minnie and Roman Castavet (Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally—each good, however not as iconic as Rosemary’s Child stars Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) proper after assembly them for the primary time. The Castavets, you see, merely adore serving to troubled younger girls get their lives collectively. They’re additionally good associates with a Bramford resident (Jim Sturgess) who’s written a brand new musical that Terry would dearly like to be forged in.
We all know that is all a really dangerous thought—in any case, Terry’s destiny is the explanation Rosemary Woodhouse turns into Devil’s subsequent womb of curiosity—however James and Garner discover methods to deliver emotional nuance to Terry’s more and more bleak scenario. Very very like Rosemary, she has to place the items collectively for herself in a narrative drenched in aggressive ambition, gaslighting, emotional abuse, sexual assault, physique horror, loneliness, and the petrifying feeling of not being secure in a single’s own residence. However in distinction to Rosemary—a housewife cheerfully hoping to grow to be pregnant—Terry is single, broke, unable to seek out work, and with none assist system past her sympathetic greatest buddy.
For all of the callbacks to Rosemary’s Child (most of them are apparent: the impulsive quick haircut, the vodka blush cocktails, a memorable silver necklace), the brand new film does make one main alteration involving the intersecting plots of the 2 movies—it’s an intriguing alternative, and one which provides a layer of separation between Terry and Rosemary’s ordeals.
However there’s additionally one other huge distinction that’s much less simple to place your finger on. One of the chilling points of Rosemary’s Child is that it’s not simply the story of a mom-to-be slowly realizing she’s the goal of an evil conspiracy. Most of it takes place within the Bramford, but it surely feels greater than that. Together with the protagonist, the viewer steadily begins to really feel paranoid concerning the world Rosemary’s Child takes place in. Simply how many individuals are members on this apocalyptic plot? Is that this a worldwide future of doom we can not keep away from? By the point that well-known closing scene rolls round, our fears are largely confirmed true.
Residence 7A feels extra intimate. Terry could fantasize about having her identify up in lights, however she’s extra generally recognized round Broadway as “the woman who fell,” a snarky reference to her devastating onstage tumble. However she’s additionally “the woman who fell” for the concept that full strangers will be selfless and sort—and who realizes too late the devastating value required to deliver her glittering desires again to life.
On a closing word, there’s an extra similarity that hyperlinks Residence 7A and The First Omen: each have been made by girls, in distinction to the traditional movies that impressed them. So typically in horror we see feminine characters put by way of their paces by male administrators; these movies sign a welcome change in perspective, notably because it involves the acquainted style trope of girls’s our bodies being seized and appropriated in grisly methods.
Residence 7A streams on Paramount+ and will likely be accessible for digital buy September 27.
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