There wasn’t any urgent necessity to this April’s horror prequel The First Omen, a film that took us back to tell a tale we mostly knew already. Filling in the specifics of Damien’s backstory, before he was adopted by a couple unaware of his satanic conception, was not something even the most impassioned Omen fans were thirsting for but it came to be because of Disney’s Fox purchase and a greedy desire to stuff its streamer Hulu with content associated with known IP, the common contemporary reasoning that forces existence: could over should.
But a strike-affected release schedule, and I would imagine some enthused test screenings, pushed it into cinemas instead and while it wasn’t without its problems, it was made with such visual flair and frightening inventiveness that it ultimately felt like a worthwhile revisit. Months later, the same cannot be said about Paramount’s similarly conceived Apartment 7A, a prequel to another landmark horror, but one that’s never able to explain why it needs to exist or why we should spend any of our precious streaming time on it.
Unlike The First Omen, the film, a look back to the months before the beginning of Roman Polanski’s near-perfect 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, hasn’t been able to escape its origins, a low-key home on Paramount+ next to the film that inspired it. It tracks given how low-key it also looks and feels, not quite as cheap and murkily lit as the worst of the made-for-streaming movies but never artful or alive enough to feel worthier of a bigger screen.
The contained brilliance of Polanski’s original, which starred Mia Farrow as a woman who starts to realise her unborn child is the spawn of the devil, made it tough for those trying to milk more. But its popularity (the film made over 10 times its budget and won a best supporting actress Oscar) meant that more came anyway, from a barely seen TV movie sequel to a loathed 1997 follow-up novel by Levin to a stretched Zoe Saldaña miniseries remake in 2014. There’s a similar sense of pointlessness to the John Krasinski-produced Apartment 7A, which focuses on a minor one-scene character from the original and tells us how she was once part of the same plan that ultimately ensnared Rosemary.
It stars Julia Garner, an actor who one would think deserved better than this after award-winning work on Ozark and two impactful collaborations with Kitty Green (The Assistant and The Royal Hotel). She’s playing Terry Gionoffrio, an ambitious yet penniless dancer whose Broadway dreams have been scuppered by a nasty foot injury. Taken in by the Castevets (Dianne Wiest standing in for Ruth Gordon and Kevin McNally taking over from Sidney Blackmer), she finds her luck turning, the older couple treating her like family, a little smothering but ever-helpful, allowing her to stay rent-free in an apartment in their extravagant building. But as we know all too well, the Castevets have a nefarious agenda, devil worshippers who are fixated on a plan to topple the dominance of God, looking for a young woman who might be able to help …
Like the original, the film wisely realises that those eager to enter show business are most likely to be lured by the promise of selling one’s soul. While Terry’s deal here is far less obvious than that offered to Rosemary’s ruthless actor husband, she’s still blinded by the idea of her name up in lights. When her career ascendence is threatened by pregnancy, the film does wrestle with what that would have meant for a woman in the 1960s, and co-writer/director Natalie Erika James finds some brief mileage in exploring the thorny topic of abortion at the time. But nothing quite matches the surprisingly progressive and wrenching horror of its predecessor, which showed us the devastating isolation that can be felt by some pregnant women, gaslit by male doctors and husbands, kept away from other women who might be able to offer genuine help. Farrow’s terror at the unending pain she feels and how no one seems to understand or care cuts far deeper than anything here.
James had impressed with her debut, the dementia horror Relic, but any of that film’s texture or creepiness has dissolved on a larger scale. Her film flatly plods through unscary and overused dream sequences to unconvincing London streets masquerading as New York to the unavoidable redundancy of the whole endeavour. Garner and Wiest are compelling, even if it’s impossible not to compare the latter to Gordon’s all-timer performance, but we know exactly where their characters are headed and the script, co-written by Christian White and Skylar James, isn’t able to surprise or scare us on the way.
It’s admittedly close to impossible to make a film that would in any way compare to something as beloved and indelible as Rosemary’s Baby but then why even bother in the first place?
Apartment 7A is available on Paramount+ on 27 September
