A lot of people view Roman Polanski as a man who made some horrible choices in his life and fled the country to avoid persecution back in 1978. I myself acknowledge that he did these things and it is a despicable thing. That being said one must be able to separate the art from the person. He has brought us some of the most visually and emotionally compelling movies over the past 50 years. So that being said a decade before any of these horrible things took place Polanski would set out to make one of the most brilliant horror movies and all around films of all time.
I have said this several times with movies like Jaws and Pulp Fiction that if I was stuck on a island and had the ability to bring five movies with me Rosemary's Baby would be on that list. A good movie is a good movie. A great movie keeps you seeing new points of view and new things every time you pop it in. Rosemary's Baby not only has you seeing new things but also keeps you genuinely unnerved the entire way every time you watch it.
The film follows Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) Woodhouse, newly weds who are looking for a place to start a family. They come across a apartment in an old building known as the Bramford and everything seems like its going perfect. The couple move in and everything is on track. They start to meet different people in the apartment including an older couple Mini (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackner) Castevet. They seem perfectly friendly and invite the couple over for dinner. During all this the Rosemary and Guy are trying to get pregnant. After returning home from dinner the two attempt to conceive and a strange occurrence takes place that Rosemary chalks up to a bad dream mixed with being overly tired. She wakes up the next day with the memory of having sex but still troubled by the weird dream. The two soon discover that they are pregnant and the movie begins to creep towards the joyous day of birth. Or so Rosemary would like to believe.
We get a real treat with Rosemary's Baby in the sense that you are never quite sure if you are watching someone being paranoid or if it is you the viewer feeling the paranoia. Farrow does such an amazing job playing a woman who feels like she is going crazy and never can tell who is out to get her and who has her real best interest.
The supporting cast to Farrow is incredible especially Gordon who won an Oscar for best supporting actress. She has the perfect levels of menace and comedy mixed in so you are never quite sure if you can trust her up to the very end.
The film plays like a dream in someways and always has you trying to hold on to reality with as much effort as humanly possible.
It is the perfectly blending of time and film making. This film could not be pulled off today with modern technology and works so well in the time period it is set in.
All in all there is too much good stuff to say about Rosemary's Baby without telling you to go watch it. Word of advice don't watch if you are pregnant and a little prone to paranoia
So we got through the extensive labor of today's blog join us tomorrow when we ask that immortal question of are we truly alone in the universe? For High Weirdness I'm Benjamin Kolton reminding you "It's Only a Movie." "It's Only a Movie."
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