Rosemary's Baby
Roman Polanski
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Plot Summary
Possibly the best horror film ever made, this brilliant adaptation of Ira Levin's best-selling novel is the story of a loving young New York City couple who are expecting their first child. Like most first-time mothers, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) experiences confusion and fear. Her husband (John Cassavetes), an ambitious but unsuccessful actor, makes a pact with the devil that promises to send his career skyward. Director Roman Polanski elicits uniformly extraordinary performance from the all-star cast. Ruth Gordon won an Oscar for her performance as an oversolicitous next-door neighbor in this classic chiller.
Credits
Actors
- Mia Farrow
- John Cassavetes
- Ruth Gordon
- Sidney Blackmer
- Maurice Evans
- Ralph Bellamy
- Patsy Kelly
- Elisha Cook jr.
- Hanna Landy
- Emmaline Henry
Director
Producer
- William Castle
Movie Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes
TOMATOMETER
98%- Reviews Counted: 60
- Fresh: 59
- Rotten: 1
- Average Rating: 8.6/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: Even readers of the book who know how Baby comes out are in for a pleasant surprise: the very real acting ability of Mia Farrow.
Fresh: Several exhilarating milestones are achieved in Rosemary's Baby, an excellent film version of Ira Levin's diabolical chiller novel.
Fresh: Superbly acted (especially by bone-thin Farrow and Ruth Gordon as the ultimate neighbor from hell), it's a satantango in the land of Is-this-real-or-am-I-crazy?, with a luridly literal ending that doesn't negate the previous, more interior terrors.
Fresh: Hunched, black-eyed, leering, John Cassavetes's Guy is a contaminated satanic canal in himself.
Customer Reviews
You're lying! You're witches!
For over 20 years, Hollywood has been flinging croaking Japanese ghosts and chainsaw-wielding psychos onto the screen. But, try as they might, they will never come close to the absolutely terrifying Rosemary's Baby. This is perhaps the best horror film of all time. It invokes a sense of claustrophobia as its heroine, played by the beautiful and ingenious Mia Farrow, is gradually ensnared into the plot of the seemingly well-to-do neighbors that lurk just down the hall from the closed quarters of their apartment. It also conjurs the greatest fear, that not only your life, but the life of your child is in danger. It may not make you jump, but it manages to get under your skin and make you keep the light on for many years to come. I'm only 12 and I'm already horrified of what to do when my wife gets pregnant.
Response to maila
Um, 'maila'? Your response to this film illustrates perfectly the sad state of affairs for our culture. I know Roman Polanski is no Michael Bay or Joel Shumacher, but it will probably be good for you, in both cinema appreciation and in life, to learn how to expand your attention span just a little bit. Slower paced films allow you to contemplate what you're watching, and why; you might even make connections between film and the larger world you're a part of, rather than simply entertaining your eyes with a lot of fast cutting between random shots, music, explosions, etc. Try on iTunes: any other Polanski film (e.g. "Chinatown"); "The Parallax View"; "The Thin Blue Line", "Once Upon a Time in the West"; even "The English Patient" for other quality (i.e. "slow") movies on iTunes. Once you get the hang of it, you might even be ready to start renting the entire Criterion Collection. (Sorry to be condescending, but your review demanded it.)
To all of you who say this "too slow"
Slowly developing, agonizing suspense is great horror and far more creative and hard to pull off well than all these recent movies that only look for new ways to torture people. That's porno not horror. This generation of short attention span kids that pay $10 to see any piece of crap if the body count is high enough is the reason there are no good horror movies any more.
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- $5.99
- Genre: Horror
- Released: 1968
- 1968 Paramount Pictures Corporation and William Castle Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved. TM, ® & Copyright © 2004 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
