"Apartment 7A" sets a chilling scene for 'Rosemary's Baby"

Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 staple for fans of horror movies and as Apartment 7A sets the stage for that classic featuring Mia Farrow as the titular Rosemary, I looked forward to this prequel installment. The trailer certainly piqued my interest with its tale of desperation turning to dread as Terry Gionoffrio overcomes a career-devastating injury as a dancer, but comes under the influence of the people she describes as "like real grandparents."

"I knew this would happen."

Let's get the plot out of the way. Because Terry Gionoffrio is the name of a young woman who appears briefly in Rosemary's Baby before her suicide, we know that this film cannot have a happy ending. Terry admits in the original that "[The Castavets] picked me up off the sidewalk - literally...I was starving and on dope and doing a lot of other things."

As the film opens, Terry takes a flying leap and horrifically injures her ankle. Before she is taken in by the "like real grandparents" Castavets, she is unable to make rent and buying drugs off the street. She works hard to return to her professional life, but no one wants to work with "the girl who fell."

After being given a place to live, free of charge, she goes for a drink with a powerful person in the theater world and date rape is implied. Her vision goes blurry, she wakes up in a strange bed with marks on her body, and has no memory of what happened after that first sip of her old-fashioned. She gets a part, first in the chorus, and then in a soloist's role, in a Broadway show.

It is at this point that she finds herself pregnant and begins to experience delusions and visions. Her mental health deteriorates and, as we knew would happen, she died on the street in front of the Bramford apartment building.

"The most wonderful people in the world, bar none."

That is the overview of the movie, but the details of how we get from one plot point to the next is sometimes complex.

One of the central differences between the Mia Farrow tale of life at the Bramford and this harrowing tale starring Julia Garner is the isolation of the main character. In Rosemary's Baby, there is certainly an air of the dangerous where the characters are concerned, but Rosemary has more of a life beyond her eventual entrapment. Garner plays Terry with a wonderful loneliness. Her scenes of performing and her unsuccessful auditions after her recovery from an ankle injury highlight how isolated she has become from the world that gave her joy and hope. We even see her in the scene where she meets Rosemary, but it seems as though she almost sleepwalks through the encounter. The culmination of her story is surprisingly one of her own power even if it is a tragedy.

Jim Sturgess plays producer Alan Marchand, whose role in Terry's life seems from the start to be that of a capricious god. He is the one who humiliates her for her desperation to return to the stage, but also opens the doors for her to become a star in a show about a man making a Faustian bargain. While Terry feels terror at the prospect of an unplanned pregnancy, Alan becomes protective and devoted.

Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally must be assessed together. The Castavets of the original movie set alarm bells off because of their persistent nosiness, but Wiest and McNally show a sense of unapologetic entitlement and this is more effective as far as the storytelling goes.

Apartment 7A can be found streaming on Paramount+.