Vague Visages’ Apartment 7A review contains minor spoilers. Natalie Erika James’ 2024 Paramount+ movie features Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

With the fate of Roe v. Wade hanging in the balance of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it’s hardly a surprise that a new wave of horror movies tackling female bodily autonomy and the right to choose have emerged in the months before American voters go to the polls. Gory exploitation throwbacks like The First Omen (2024) and Immaculate (2024) brought these anxieties kicking and screaming into the multiplex earlier this year but could easily be written off as focusing more on provocation than sensitive allegory. Apartment 7A, however, aims for introspection alongside its shocks, befitting the paranoid Ira Levin novel — and subsequent 1968 Roman Polanski-directed screen adaptation — it acts as a prelude to. But nobody could accuse the 2024 Paramount+ release of sharing the same audaciousness as any of the films listed above, as director Natalie Erika James (Relic) manages to follow a near-identical narrative formula to Rosemary’s Baby but without the sense of genuine danger. A story that should retain its prescience is rendered nothing more than nostalgia bait.

The only genuinely shocking moment in Apartment 7A occurs within the opening five minutes, as aspiring Broadway dancer Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner) injures herself during a routine, becoming a showbiz pariah before she even gets a chance to make a name for herself. The American actress’ strongest performances to date have been in her intense collaborations with Australian director Kitty Green — The Assistant (2019), The Royal Hotel (2023) — and in this very early stretch, James taps into her lead’s ability to quietly and powerfully portray women at a breaking point in toxic, male-dominated spaces. Apartment 7A leaps a few months forward to an audition in which Terry is forced by a director to endlessly repeat the dance move she injured herself doing before — a horrifying sequence which ties in perfectly to a story about being forced to hand away bodily autonomy to a higher (or perhaps lower) power. This happens before the 10-minute mark and proves far more unsettling than any of the Satanic shenanigans that follow.

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After collapsing in the street following the audition, Terry meets Minnie (Dianne Wiest) and Roman Castavet (Kevin McNally) — an eccentric, long-married couple who quickly take a shine to her. To James’ partial credit, Apartment 7A understands that the younger generation who make up the vast majority of horror viewers likely won’t have seen Rosemary’s Baby, and aims to keep the audience in the dark about Minnie and Roman’s true plans for Terry. However, there is an inherent problem in this approach in that the couple’s secret plan for the protagonist is the same one they’d have for Rosemary, all but ensuring that returning fans will be eager for Apartment 7A to hurry up and get to the Satanism.

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The direct-to-streaming brand extension arrives courtesy of producer Michael Bay, who had been trying to get a new adaptation of Levin’s novel off the ground as far back as 2008, around the time he helped produce several dire remakes of horror classics. Apartment 7A is, mercifully, far better than any of the reboots in that lineage but offers equally as little substance. As with the recent wave of “reboot-quels” like Twisters (2024), this is a new story designed to replicate all the beats of the original, offering nothing in the way of surprises to familiar viewers while aiming to recapture its highs. That may work in an action-driven popcorn blockbuster, but it’s an unsuccessful approach when it comes to a supernatural mystery; when the audience knows the secret that’s being willfully left offscreen until the very end, it only conjures frustration. You can’t create intrigue when a precedent for how this will take shape has already been set.

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Apartment 7A benefits from solid performances from Garner and Wiest, even if the latter actress will inevitably suffer in comparison to Ruth Gordon’s Oscar winning turn as Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby. Still, Wiest understands the psychodramatic wavelength the movie operates on, and manages to play that down even as her character’s motormouthed, quirky persona is played up. The juxtaposition of a mundane, busybody New Yorker with the occult Minnie aims to serve generates the most uncanny chills in Rosemary’s Baby, and it’s the only aspect where Apartment 7A almost recaptures what made the original so great. And yet, the question still remains: why watch a movie almost succeed in replicating one aspect of Rosemary’s Baby when you could just revisit the 1968 classic on the same streaming platform?

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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