Review of Rosemary's Baby (1968) by Lance A — 16 Feb 2011

Effective horror is hard to do, especially nowadays, but Rosemary's Baby remains an effective and upsetting horror movie. With no real heroes, a bleak ending, and imagery that is unsettlingly vague, it retains its power as a great model of paranoia.

Its characters are so realistic to the point that it occasionally made me wriggle in my seat in discomfort, and it was hard to identify what each character's agenda was. Polanski does a nice job with chipping away at Rosemary's sanity and our trust by offering up lots of nebulousness as well as treating us to the occasional glimpse of agitation or disconcertion.

This works time and time again because Polanski shifts in unidentifiable patterns where nothing happens and then something is suggested or hinted. This is a process, and as such the movie is perhaps a bit too long.

But there is a reason it's a classic of horror and that is that the movie succeeds in manipulating and disturbing its audience.