Rosemary’s Baby 1968 ★★½

I can envision using this movie in a critical thinking class. During the entire movie, I’m thinking about “pre-partum” syndrome, and then two hours into the movie, the Cassavetes character mentions it. 

Here we have the crux of the simple horror movie: is it all in the protagonist’s mind, the wild conspiracies that he or she believes, or is the evidence he/she sees mean something in their own real world? A better movie that handles this, an older one, is “A Matter of Life and Death.” You get this simple setup a lot, sometimes done well and mostly done too simply, even up into the current period, with Ari Aster’s “Hereditary,” or a slightly older movie that people I know love, “A Beautiful Mind.”

The crux of these movies is whether the protagonist is a paranoid schizophrenic or not. By 1968, the DSM manual had diagnosed this formally as a common-enough mental disorder. It could form in pregnant women, hence pre-partum syndrome. “Rosemary’s Baby” features a pregnant woman who puts about ten pieces of evidence together, believing that she’s being managed by a secret Satanic cult that her husband has been seduced by.

Now, is it more likely that she’s a paranoid schizophrenic, or the only person who sees the cult for what it is? I prefer ambiguity, so “A Matter of Life and Death” wins out in my mind, a movie with a strong theological bent. I believe that Aster has been siding with mental disorders over the extreme possibility of secret cults, as in the case of “Hereditary.” “Rosemary’s Baby” sets up what Aster is doing, and while I hope he is sending regular checks of gratitude to Polanski, I need to re-evaluate him because I think he’s better than what I’ve given him credit for.

“Rosemary’s Baby” takes its sweet time to develop its simple paranoia plot. It’s well-made. Polanski uses POV handheld shots to simulate disorientation, in just the right spots. His tight framing, in terms of horizontal framing and depth, really makes this picture work suspensefully. He one-upped Hitchcock, in terms of that, in this 1968 Hollywood movie.

Still, 136 minutes of this gets repetitive. Yes, we know she’s either got a mental condition or she’s right. Or maybe both, though that’s the least likely of the three options. More likely, since this is a movie that inadvertently asks us to critically think about these possibilities, she’s under the spell of her own confirmation bias, plus pregnancy-induced hormonal delusions. That the movie at least acknowledges this common problem probably was beneficial: empathy for pregnant woman and those who have given birth is generally lacking, especially since over 50% of the population will never undergo what they have.

Do we believe the movie’s final scene? I don’t — it could just be all in her head — but maybe that makes me more of a materialist than I ought to be. Certainly, for mid 60s Californians, wacky cults existed, as Polanski unfortunately experienced right around this time. The movie belongs less (to me) to the horror genre than to the paranoid-conspiracy thriller genre in vogue at this time, and probably destined to never go away as long as viewers perceive super-powerful forces controlling them (e.g., Big Government; Big Tech). 

Anyway, Satan is a wimp and a loser, according to Christian theology, and for a movie to be premised on the dread of Satanic cults doesn’t move me at all. I’d rather see something like Herzog or Gilliam has done — make me worry that in fact there is nothing beyond the universe and that death is a giant black void that obliterates your existence. That is scarier, by far, than a Satanic cult, which can be taken care of by a number of simple means, God bless the American justice system and the Second Amendment.

Last, now I see that Aronovsky not only one-upped “Rosemary’s Baby,” but upped it by orders of magnitude in “Mother.” I would like my Satanic-cult thriller pictures to be more theologically and fantasy-oriented, so “Mother” is a rewatchable gem, but not “Rosemary’s Baby” for me. All of this is said in terms of just my own preferences, for those who love this movie. 

I should add that the movie is strongly about, obviously, women being managed during their pregnancy, particularly by men. A much better movie that it extremely deep and rich on this topic is the near-contemporary Bergman film, “Brink of Life.” Hollywood, as usual, dumbs down the topic a bit and turns it into a money-generating product.