Apartment 7A: regurgitating a classic psychological horror film as a boring profit-making exercise

Natalie Erika James, “Apartment 7A” (2024)

Essentially a remake of Roman Polanski’s famous psychological horror flick “Rosemary’s Baby”, this film is set just before the events of the original film and features as its main character Terri Gionoffrio who appears briefly at the start of “Rosemary’s Baby” as a drug addict and later suicide victim. In “Apartment 7A” – the title refers to the number of the apartment where both Terri and later Rosemary live – Terri (Julia Garner) is an ambitious if struggling young dancer who has just arrived in New York City to fulfill her dreams of stage stardom. An accident forces Terri to accept shelter from the Castevets, an elderly couple who own the luxury residential building the Bramford. Terri wastes little time in moving into a very spacious flat there, and soon is offered a part in a musical by a resident there who turns out to be a Broadway producer. Unexpectedly though, Terri starts having strange experiences including apparent hallucinations and various dreams that seem all too real, in particular one very surreal dream in which she is drugged, forcibly strapped to a table and then raped by a shadowy being that looks very demonic …

From here on the film centres around Terri’s struggle and determination to find out what is really happening to her, especially as she discovers that she is pregnant, while at the same time she must attend rehearsals for the stage musical and keep fit, healthy and sane. The Castevets (Diane West and Kevin MacNally) become increasingly sinister, even threatening, as they continually intrude into Terri’s home life, asking for sugar or offering her food. The Broadway producer (Jim Sturgess) is prominent early on in the film but after Terri’s impregnation fades into the sidelines of the stage play. Various incidents, small though they may be, eventually add up to something that menaces Terri’s sanity, even her own life and the lives of others around her, and she realises that she must make a decision that not only may end her career as a dancer but also … well, you can guess the rest.

Character for character, plot twist for plot twist, even almost scene for scene,”Apartment 7A” retells “Rosemary’s Baby” without the latter’s symbolism and metaphors in which a young woman discovers that everything that appears normal and which she takes for granted is in fact demonic and part of an evil occult conspiracy; and that in spite of everything she does to save herself, everybody around her – her husband, her neighbours, even her doctor – is part of the conspiracy. Made during the 1960s civil rights era and the rise of second-wave feminism, “Rosemary’s Baby” examines issues of individual autonomy, isolation and alienation from the viewpoint of an outsider in Western (specifically American) society – it actually forms part of a natural trilogy with Polanski’s other films “Repulsion” and “The Tenant” – and its true horror comes with its heroine’s acceptance of her subservient role as the mother of the Anti-Christ in the conspiracy (and by implication as a mother and wife in Western society). Unfortunately, “Apartment 7A” offers no similar subtext of social rebellion behind Terri’s struggle against the Castevets and their followers, or even of her own self-discovery and examination which lead her to disown her dreams of becoming famous. As a result, the film ends up flat, with a boring and predictable story inhabited by characters that are little more than stereotypes that viewers find no sympathy for. The film relies on familiar horror-film shock tactics such as dreams and hallucinations rather than on the horror drawn from the situations Terri finds herself in, or from the characters themselves, and ends up shallow and superficial in its execution.

Julia Garner does a decent enough job playing Terri but though her performance as a lonely young dancer in the grip of inhuman forces she barely understands is solid, it cannot compensate for an uninspired and repetitive plot lacking originality and spark. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last will viewers of this and other recent Hollywood films feel that the industry is recycling and regurgitating its past for revenue and profit, and exploiting the public in so doing.