Roman Polański - Rosemary's Baby (1968), 6/10

Polański submits another successful thriller film with Rosemary’s Baby and what is perhaps one of the more entertaining horror films of the sixties. Mia Farrow is a believably anxious protagonist and her seemingly tenuous grasp on reality creates an interesting cinematic exploration of perception and madness. There are several striking scenes that are genuinely unsettling, especially given the choice to make the villains elderly and somewhat docile outside of their explicitly evil behavior. Even in the final sequence of the film they are presented as ridiculous in their Satanism rather than outright dangerous, only coercing Rosemary with her maternal instinct rather than providing any straightforwardly evil backlash to her just outrage. Some sequences push the narrative forward too slowly and interrupt an otherwise well-paced story such as Rosemary’s visit to Dr. Hill, but these are scattered lulls in an otherwise tightly presented film. The back-and-forth tension, sometimes painfully obvious and other times appropriately subtle, generally flows naturally and pleasantly. The surreal comedy of the ending is only aided by the crawling pace, and is perhaps the greatest brilliance of the storytelling, providing one of the most satisfyingly skin-crawling conclusions in film. The entire picture is unsettling which makes the final peak of insanity even more impactful. The subtle build of the first act is the other crowning achievement of the story, artfully constructed and assembled with a grounded sequence of events before introducing the supernatural, again adding to the impact of its later twists and turns. It is still held back by what makes it a great film, however, in that the entire film’s narrative success teeters on its ending, making subsequent viewings less interesting and giving the picture a sort of cheap hokey quality in retrospect.