Rosemary’s Baby

Content Warning: This review covers sensitive topics such as suicide and rape.

Newlyweds Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse are in the market for a new home — Guy’s acting career has become more stable and they want to start a family. They look at an apartment in the Bramford building, a place that was home to several strange happenings involving women accused of witchcraft and a man who apparently ran a cult being beaten to death in the building’s lobby.

The couple are shown around an apartment that was rented by an old lady but she unfortunately went into a coma and died — but not in the Bramford as the building’s custodian stresses. Seeing the potential in the space, Rosemary is very keen to sign the contract, Guy isn’t so sure and takes some persuading.

Still settling in and decorating, Rosemary heads down to the creepy basement where the laundry room is and meets with Terry who is living with Rosemary’s neighbours Minnie and Roman Castevet. Terry confesses she was on the street and suffered from drug addiction before the Castevet’s found her and took her in.

The women become quick friends, but their friendship is cut short when Terry, despite seeming absolutely fine just a few hours before, commits suicide by throwing herself out of the 7th floor window of the Castevet’s apartment.

The Castevet’s invite Guy and Rosemary around for dinner which they attend just to be polite, but Guy becomes fascinated with Roman’s tales and begins to spend more time with the couple. Rosemary finds it a bit odd and tries to stay away as she finds Minnie a bit of a meddling busybody but puts up with her as she doesn’t want to upset her elderly neighbour.

All of a sudden, Guy’s career begins to take off. The lead of the play he had a minor role in inexplicably went blind and the producers are offering Guy the lead, a role that will make his career and will be much more lucrative than the small motorcycle commercials and background roles he’s had up to this point.

Because of this stability, Guy decides it’s a perfect time for them to start a family which Rosemary happily agrees to but as her pregnancy moves along, Rosemary becomes sicker and doesn’t show the healthy glow that most expectant mothers have. She finds herself craving raw meat and suffers from terrible stomach pains for months. Guy is becoming more distant, refusing to even look at Rosemary let alone share in the joys of upcoming parenthood.

The Castevet’s take a large role in Rosemary’s pregnancy and she begins to suspect they have ulterior motives over-and-above concern for a pregnant neighbour. Little does Rosemary know that she’s about to be drawn into a world of Satan worship, witchcraft and that she is the price her husband must pay after he made a deal with the devil himself.

Are the Castevet’s and Guy really in league with the devil or is Rosemary’s paranoia being driven by a difficult pregnancy and a lack of sleep? Will Rosemary even survive her pregnancy? And if she does, what type of mother will she be?

Problematic Polanski

🎃Warning: Spoilers for Rosemary’s Baby ahead🍼

Okay, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first. This film was made 10 years before the director Roman Polanski was arrested and charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. With Polanski being around 35 at the time of making Rosemary’s Baby I think it’s fair to assume that he was up to disgusting things before his arrest in 1977.

This review is in no way a defence of Polanski or an endorsement of his actions but I think his attitude towards women can be seen on full display in this film and is the basis for the way he went about filming it it.

As well as directing, Polanski also wrote the screenplay which was based on the 1967 book of the same name by Ira Levin but it’s important to point out that I haven’t read the book so I don’t know how closely Polanski’s script follows the novel but I have added it to my reading list.

But no matter how closely Polanski sticks to Levin’s original work, Rosemary’s Baby is still Polanski’s vision and that’s what counts here.

A Shell Of A Woman

Rosemary is portrayed as an extremely fragile woman. I know this is the 1960s but this was the decade that gave us strong Bond Girls and Barbarella came out the same year as Rosemary’s Baby so it’s not like there wasn’t any precedent for strong female characters.

Rosemary can’t exist without Guy, both physically in terms of a home and food, and mentally in terms of personality. She rarely talks about herself, but often talks about Guy’s career and the plays that he has been in. She seems to have no hobbies once the initial apartment decoration has been completed and is separated from her female friend group once they move into the Bramford.

Once Rosemary becomes pregnant she loses even more agency: she can’t choose the doctor she sees or has any say in the treatment and medicine she receives.

Before she was pregnant she was a vessel for Guy’s ego and once pregnant she’s merely a vessel for “Guy’s” child. And this lack of agency and self is further seen in the drugging and rape scene.

Millie makes a mousse pudding for Rosemary and Guy, but Rosemary thinks it tastes funny and doesn’t want to eat it. Guy is quite nasty about this and goads her into eating it but Rosemary manages to hide most of the mousse and only eats some.

She was right about the mousse as it’s drugged, but even the small amount she ate is enough to incapacitate her so she can be taken to the Castevet’s apartment where they conduct a ritual to bring forth Satan to impregnate Rosemary.

The terrible part of this is that if Rosemary had just eaten the mousse should wouldn’t have been aware of anything that had happened to her, but because she exerted a little bit of self control and ownership over her own body she’s partially aware of the rape happening — she thinks it’s a dream, realises it’s happening and then slips back in to the dream state again — and this is a punishment for being her own person.

I think that if Rosemary had been a stronger character to begin with in terms of self-determination and agency the rape scene would have been even more tragic: her husband knew that Rosemary would never agree to the satanic ritual and so they took the choice away from her. But, as portrayed, Guy pretty much makes all of Rosemary’s decisions for her anyway and the drugging is just an extension of that and it loses some of the visceral power it could have had.

Free Will Is A Myth In This Universe

As Rosemary starts to uncover the details of the cult, her friend Hutch provides some insights before being put into a coma just as he was going to tell Rosemary some important information.

If we cast our minds back to the start of the film, the lady that originally rented the apartment that the Woodhouse’s move into also mysteriously fell into a coma and died.

This means that the events that drive the film are set in motion before Rosemary’s even set foot in the Bramford apartment building.

There are a couple of lines from Roman and Millie Castevet that say Rosemary should be pleased that out of all the women in the world she was the one that Satan chose to bear his child. We don’t know how or when she was chosen but it means that everything in Rosemary’s life would have culminated in the events that befell her.

The woman’s coma was set up from the beginning, forces moved to let Rosemary know the apartment was available at a price that she and Guy could afford. Guy was always going to be enticed to the dark side by the promise of fame no matter how much he resisted and Rosemary was destined to get pregnant by Satan whether she ate that mousse or not.

No matter what Rosemary did, there was only one outcome available to her.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Is The Hand That Rules The World

I Mandela Effected myself with the end of this film… or did I?

The end of this film stuck with me for YEARS. I distinctly remember Rosemary in her blue nightgown approaching the crib swathed in black cloth. I remember her staring into the crib and backing away terrified by what laid within it. I distinctly remember a baby in the crib with red, demon eyes and Rosemary crying out in anguish “What have you done?”

Except that didn’t happen. In the version I watched for this review, Rosemary looks into the crib and we see a flashback to the Devil’s face as he was raping her.

Is this what I remember? No! I distinctly remember seeing a baby with the Devil’s eyes. And according to Reddit a load of other people remember this too with some citing a special made-for-TV version of the film as having this scene.

So did I make it up or are a load off us in the middle of a mass hallucination?

I’m not sure, but it’s a shame we don’t see what’s in the crib if I’m honest with you.

While Rosemary’s response is raw and heart breaking — here is the son that she carried for 9 months is far from the bundle of joy she was looking forward to caring for. In its place, from what others in the scene say, is a grotesque caricature of a child, a child that only a mother could love.

At the end of the film, Rosemary approaches the crib and tentatively begins to rock it and it’s not clear whether she still feels a maternal bond towards the child, whether she’s going through the motions of what a doting mother should do, or whether the rocking is to soothe Rosemary herself.

You could argue that knowing what the child looks like would ruin the horror of the scene, but I think that if we were to see an ordinary child where the cult sees the son of Satan with his clawed hands and hooved feet, that would be even more impactful. How could Rosemary not love that son? Wouldn’t that make her the monster?

But ultimately we’re left not knowing whether Rosemary embraces the child or leaves him in the hands of the cult— and if it’s the second option, would they let her live when she’s no longer needed?

It’s interesting to try and put yourself in Rosemary’s situation isn’t it? By being the mother of Satan’s child she gains a level of respect and agency she could have never fully achieved in her normal life. If the child is as powerful as they intimate he is then I’m sure he would do anything to protect his mother (while she was relevant of course) and that elevates her over the other cult members. They might have been responsible for causing the union that created the abomination, but Rosemary is responsible for nurturing it. And with that in mind it’s really not clear what anyone would do in that situation.

Should Rosemary chose power and status by aligning herself with evil, or should she take a moral stance and probably lose her life? Let me know in the comments what you think.

Watch Rosemary’s Baby if you want to ask yourself difficult questions, or think that your elderly next door neighbours might be evil Satan worshippers.

Where to Watch:

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