Rosemary's Baby - The heir of the mystery

Synopsis: A young couple, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes), move into a building inhabited by strange people, where bizarre things happen. When she becomes pregnant, she begins to have strange hallucinations and sees her husband getting involved with the neighbors, a coven of witches who want her to give birth to the Son of Darkness.

Whenever people start discussing the scariest or most terrifying horror film of all time, I immediately think of Rosemary's Baby. For me, it is the greatest horror film of all time, without a doubt, it is considered a classic of this genre.

The theme of Satanism, conspiracy, and diabolical cults emerges in cinema with the story of a woman chosen, from among all the women in the world, as her neighbor remarks at the end of the film, to give birth to the Antichrist. Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband, the failed actor Guy (John Cassavetes), move into an old New York apartment where bizarre stories abound of sinister events and the former home of witches.

Soon the couple becomes friends with the very strange neighbors Mirian and Roman Castevet, who are actually part of a satanic sect, with whom Guy makes a pact: the gestation of the evil thing's child in his wife (in a strong scene, where she is raped in a torpor by Satan himself, in the midst of a delirium where she wonders if it is a dream or is really happening) in exchange for success and fame in his acting career, which soon begins to materialize when the rival who had won the role that should have been his, suddenly goes blind.

Watching this film at the height of the pandemic was truly moving, and it definitely scared me. Even though it's so old, it manages to immerse the viewer in the film's atmosphere of terror. Even though there aren't exactly any scares, it's such a well-crafted and well-presented story that you can't help but despair along with Rosemary.

The film emphasizes every nuance and little detail, until the whole thing builds to a simply incredible ending. Such small details as: the couple's initial visit to rent the apartment, where they find along with the landlord, a heavy cabinet that was moved by an elderly lady to block the door to a pantry, for an unknown reason; strange noises underground; chants that can be heard through the walls; the urban legends of the building's former witch residents; Rosemary having received as a gift a necklace with a smelly herb that had belonged to the former girl who lived with the Castevets until she decided to commit suicide; and the unconventional methods used by Rosemary during her pregnancy, advised by the witch couple and their obstetrician partner, Dr. Abraham Sapirstein.

It's impossible not to get involved and frightened by the magnitude of the plot. Rosymary is a sly person, she does absolutely everything she's told and only begins to realize that things are wrong much later. She's been experiencing terrible pain since the first month of pregnancy, starting to lose weight and developing an unhealthy skeletal appearance. If you were expecting a child, you'd imagine exactly the opposite would happen, right? But Rosemary "thinks" it's all very natural, passively accepting the conditions. The husband doesn't give his wife the slightest support and is always closed off and suspicious about her fears and problems. The neighboring couple and especially Mrs. Castevet, with her habit of interfering, in addition to her irritating voice constantly offering disgusting juices to Rosemary, made me feel uncomfortable all the time.

At the end of the film, the appearance of the newborn is not shown; what is most evident is the questioning of the controversy between Satanism and Christianity, since Rosemary, a girl educated in a Catholic school.

Anyway, I was hooked on the film from beginning to end, sometimes angry with Rosemary, other times feeling sorry for her, and the ending, what a fantastic ending! Rosemary's Baby proves that the less outlandish and more common the story, the scarier it becomes if it is in the hands of competent professionals.