Apartment 7A (2024) | Rosemary’s Baby-Back Ribs

When I watched The First Omen, I knew what I was getting into. With Apartment 7A, I knew nothing about it beyond the short snippet on IMDB that didn’t tell me anything of substance. My spouse wanted to take a peek at it on a day when we binged horror movies, so I sat down and watched it with her. It took me about 45 minutes—because that’s how long it takes for the plot to move—before I finally asked, “Is this just Rosemary’s Baby?” She then replied, “I think it’s a prequel.” Sure enough, the trivia confirmed that this was a prequel to the horror classic. What does Apartment 7A do to add to its established universe and justify its existence? The answer may just surprise you…or will it?

Pros

Fleeting moments of decent horror
Good acting from the cast, most of the time
Interesting moments involving dance sequences
Connects to the original film without undoing anything

Cons

Slow and plodding pace for the first half; could have been shorter
Not scary
All too familiar
Unrealistic naivety in a world that establishes itself as excessively cruel

Plot & Thoughts

Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner) is an aspiring dancer who wants to make it big one day with her dance career and get the starring role in a big performance. Unfortunately, she lands awkwardly during a show and permanently damages her ankle. The moment made her the infamous “girl who fell,” and she has been getting denied roles for shows with dancing and singing ever since. Struggling to make ends meet and living with her best friend, she starts to get desperate and eventually tries to convince the writer/producer of the next big show, Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess), that she’s worth a shot. However, she goes a little hard on her painkillers and ends up passed out in the gutter in front of his apartment, whereupon she’s discovered by two residents of the building, Minnie Castevet (Dianne Wiest) & Roman Castevet (Kevin McNally). They seem like perfectly nice people. In fact, they’re a little too nice and just seem to have a solution or an offer that will fix any one of Terry’s problems whenever they arise. They offer her an apartment they own at no cost to Terry, and she starts to have a string of good fortune with her career. There was this one night, though, which she couldn’t really remember, and she had a nightmare that involved a glittery demon molesting her, but who needs to focus on the little things, right?

Even if you haven’t seen Rosemary’s Baby, you most likely know what the film is about. Simply put, it is about a woman who is trying to have a child with her husband. They move into an apartment building that has a lot of very nice tenants, and she starts to wonder if the baby she’s going to have is actually a child of her husband’s or the Devil. It’s a movie about paranoia and being unable to trust your neighbors, despite how kind they may appear. The primary experience of Rosemary’s Baby is ambiguous paranoia. You either assume that whoever she’s talking to might be a devil worshipper who is trying to ensure she carries the antichrist to birth, or you assume that the stress of pregnancy and other factors are making Rosemary delusional. So, how do you make a prequel to this type of story, exactly?

You just make the same movie, of course! Taking a page out of The Thing’s (2011) book, the filmmakers decided the best method to make a prequel to a famous horror movie was to do an homage that resembled the original as much as possible—at least they had the decency to call it something different than the original film’s title. There are differences between Terry and Rosemary as characters, though. Terry wants to be a dancer, and pregnancy would get in the way of her career. She’s also single and without family or many friends to support her. So, her motivations are somewhat at odds with the goals of those who selected her to carry Satan’s seed, which makes things a little more complicated in some good and bad ways. Terry needs more convincing and has to be seduced by the devil worshippers, which gives her a little more agency than Rosemary, who was something of a bystander in her film. The downside is that she also comes across as excessively naive, especially when she’s experienced cruelty from others throughout the film. She gets a few good moments, but Terry is not quite as sympathetic a character as Rosemary as a result.

Where the film works is in the acting and the direction. Julia Garner does a decent job most of the time and only overacts in one scene in an alley where she is a little too “crazy” for the moment. She does a good job during the dancing and singing moments as well, some of which are shot to make everything abstract like a dream, and it works to the film’s benefit. Dianne Wiest & Kevin McNally are the real stars of the film and do a great job of playing the friendly older couple, the Castevets. They seem like convincingly altruistic people who just want to help those in need, despite the very obvious fact that their kind behavior is too good to be true. In plenty of moments throughout the film, the dialogue with Minnie Castevet is in the form of a bargain or contract to drive home the fact that there is more going on behind the scenes with them. By the time the film ends, their malice comes out, and Minnie Castevet has some really good lines.

Where Apartment 7A does not succeed is in the same places that Rosemary Baby fails, in my opinion: both movies take a long time to get going, with some really slow build-up in the first two acts, and neither movie is scary. It took 30 minutes for Terry to finally end up in the apartment and nearly an hour before she had her fateful night of demon insemination. I’m all for establishing characters and their motivations, but Terry is not that complicated of a person, and a lot of the material from the first act could have been trimmed down so we could more quickly start to get to the paranoia, which is what the original film was all about. Rosemary’s Baby is a decent movie that does paranoia well, even if the fear factor for the film is more impactful towards the innate fears of pregnancy that women experience, to which I cannot fully relate. Apartment 7A does not really start to establish Terry’s concerns for her neighbors until much later, so it relies on occasional jump scares and horrific moments to keep its plot moving. As a result, it feels like a mediocre attempt at doing the movie it’s idolizing while missing some of the key positive qualities of the original in the process. At least it has a decent ending to connect the films together in a way that makes sense.

TL;DR

Apartment 7A does not do enough to justify being a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby and mostly comes across as a mediocre copy of the original. However, it does not do so much wrong to make me say that it is not worth watching. The acting and direction are solid, and there are plenty of little moments of quality in Apartment 7A where things are done competently, even if it isn’t scary. If you can get past the extremely slow pacing and the predictability of watching a prequel that is really akin to a remake, you can do far worse.

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