The Reel Review
A struggling dancer in 1965 New York City gets a much-needed financial lifeline when a well-connected elderly couple invite her to stay rent-free in a vacant apartment in their building. But she soon learns that the meddlesome duo and their motives are sinister, in this prequel to the 1968 horror classic Rosemary’s Baby starring Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest.
Apartment 7A is based on a minor character introduced in the first few minutes of Rosemary’s Baby – hardly enough on which to base an entire prequel, but here we are. Triple Emmy award winner Garner (Ozark) gives a committed, all-in performance, as does double Oscar-winner Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway), in the role that earned Ruth Gordon an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. It’s especially impressive since they are given so little with which to work – a weak, meandering story that is dreadfully slow, lacks oomph, and frankly, is kind of pointless.
Co-writer/director Natalie Erika James (Relic) had the potential to come up with something truly terrifying and sinister like the original, playing into the psychological isolation pregnant women experience, the paranoia and the gaslighting by their male doctors. But instead, we get a bloated, boring and not even remotely scary paint-by-numbers prequel that merely mimics the plot of the original while wasting the talents of its cast. Big miss.
REEL FACTS
• In Rosemary’s Baby, the character of Terry Gianoffrio appears briefly in the laundry room seen where she tells Rosemary that Minnie and Roman Castavet have taken her in and that their apartment leads into hers.
• The actress who played the original Terry, Victoria Vetri, became close friends with Sharon Tate during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby. An illness led her to turn down an invite to visit Tate’s house on the fateful night that Charles Manson’s followers killed Tate and four others. Vetri was released from prison in 2018 after serving several years for the attempted murder of her fourth husband, whom she shot at close range during an argument in October 2010.
• Although set in New York City, Apartment 7A was filmed in London.
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