Apartment 7A is a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, and yet also a film that could only be of interest to those who’ve never seen its Oscar-winning predecessor.
Knowing the events of Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror classic is enough to murder any potential suspense generated by director Natalie Erika James’ dud, whose story once again concerns a young woman who moves into New York City’s Bramford apartment building and befriends an older couple whose kindness is laced with venom and whose allegiance is to the Dark Lord. What ensues is the exact same thing that happened to Mia Farrow’s wife, except minus the creepy surprise and, thus, any reason to pay attention.
It’s difficult to imagine what might have possessed James or star Julia Garner to embark on this unimaginative rehash, but they at least add a bit of polish and professionalism to these pointless proceedings, which pirouette around Terry Gionoffrio (Garner), who was depicted in Rosemary’s Baby as a recovering drug addict who commits suicide by leaping out a Bramford window.
In this iteration, which premieres Sept. 27 on Paramount+, Terry is a middling Broadway dancer whose aspirations are thwarted when her ankle is shattered during a performance. Living for free with her friend Annie (Marli Siu), whose other roommate is tired of financially carrying Terry, and now with no job prospects, the struggling artist finds herself with her back up against the wall, culminating with a torturous audition for “The Pale Crook” that ends with her refusing to be humiliated by producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess).
Gareth Gatrell/Paramount+
Refusing to give up, Terry follows Marchand to his home in the Bramford, where her efforts to visit him fail due to a sudden bout of wooziness that she attributes to all the pills she’s been popping. Puking on the sidewalk, she’s comforted by Roman (Kevin McNally) and Minnie Castevet (Dianne Wiest, assuming the role that won Ruth Gordon an Oscar), who tend to her and, out of the blue, offer to let her stay in the apartment next to theirs, free of charge. This is a sweet deal for the destitute Terry, and even better is that Minnie and Roman set up a get-together with Alan, giving her a second chance to make a lasting impression. She does, albeit not for the reason she intended; after getting sick from a drink made for her by Alan (uh-oh!), she passes out and has a weirdly elaborate musical dream in which she dances with a tuxedoed Alan and then has sex with him—or was it a sparkly demon?
Terry has obviously been impregnated with the spawn of Satan, because Rosemary’s Baby has already revealed that Minnie and Roman are members of a coven that, having summoned Beelzebub from the underworld, wants him to mate with a human so his world-conquering son can be born. It’s not long before Terry figures out that she’s with child and considers getting an abortion or giving the tyke away. Minnie is aghast at this suggestion and instead makes her a deal: In exchange for whatever she wants (i.e., stardom on the Great White Way!), Terry will give them the kid to raise as their own. However, despite agreeing to this arrangement, she soon has second thoughts, which just puts her in harm’s way and eventually leads to the splattery fate we’ve previously witnessed her suffer on the big screen.
Kevin McNally, Dianne Wiest, and Julia Garner
Gareth Gatrell/Paramount+
Under normal circumstances, that summary might constitute a major spoiler for Apartment 7A. Yet since James’ film (co-written with Christian White and Skylar James) doesn’t attempt to upend expectations, it’s difficult to comprehend how anyone with passing knowledge of the original won’t know precisely what’s coming from the moment go. That means the material is really targeted at Rosemary’s Baby ignoramuses, although why they would want to sit through a prequel to a 56-year-old supernatural thriller they’ve never watched is also a mystery. It’s as if everyone involved was so intent on mining their famous IP for a spin-off that they didn’t bother thinking about the fact that they were making a feature for virtually no one.
As she demonstrated with her 2020 debut Relic, James is an assured director with an astute feel for the macabre, and Apartment 7A reaffirms that as well as indicates that she might be a great candidate for a cinematic musical; her staging and camerawork during those sequences is smoother than much of what’s seen in the genre today.
Garner is likewise captivating as the striving Terry, whose ambition puts her in the crosshairs of nefarious forces and, even when she suspects that things aren’t right, pushes her to risk it all in pursuit of her spotlight goal. Still, because it’s embedded in the narrative’s DNA that Garner is playing a doomed victim, and that Minnie and Roman’s m.o. is having the Devil rape narcotized women, there’s nothing she or anyone else can do to elicit engagement with this ho-hum action. Aside from a few faux-startling images—a baby in a clothes dryer, a horned Lucifer in a reflection, a bunch of senior citizens in hooded robes standing in a circle—it’s simply shocking in its mundanity.
Julia Garner and Jim Sturgess
Gareth Gatrell/Paramount+
So creatively barren is Apartment 7A that it has multiple scenes of Terry waking up from a scary dream that, gasp, is really a fuzzy memory of her sexual violation at the hands of Satan. Towards its conclusion, it begins ending scenes without resolving them, be it a meeting with a nun who explicates everything to Terry and drops to her knees to pray upon realizing she’s pregnant, or a subsequent abortion sequence in which the provider is gripped by an invisible force and then, well, who knows?
Even Terry’s post-accident nickname, “The Girl Who Falls,” is an on-the-nose means of aligning her with her fallen-angel lover-to-be. Factor in Wiest’s over-the-top, if less colorfully particular, performance as Minnie, the nosy neighbor from Hell (get it?) and Apartment 7A dithers about in search of a single unique element that might justify its existence. Alas, that never comes—a situation that’s as frustrating as the coda’s wink-wink connection to Rosemary’s Baby is eye-rollingly predictable.
