Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Apartment 7A’ on Paramount+, the ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Prequel We Know We Didn’t Need

‘Apartment 7A’ Ending Explained: Who Is the Couple in the ‘Apartment 7A’ End Credits Scene?

This week on For The Love of God (or Satan) Please Leave Well Enough Alone Theatre is Apartment 7A ( now streaming on Paramount+ ), the prequel to Rosemary’s Baby that nobody in their right mind asked for. By all accounts, the original 1968 film in which Mia Farrow carries the offspring of the Great Horned One in her uterus is a classic, a benchmark for psychological horror cinema. It’s already spawned a crummy sequel (made for TV, 1976) and a crummy TV-miniseries remake (directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2014), and now we have a semi-crummy prequel starring the highly talented Julia Garner ( The Assistant , Ozark ) as the recipient of the unholy seed, and Dianne Wiest, who channels the spirit of Ruth Gordon as diabolical nice lady Minnie Castavet. Yes, my dukes are up, because the only reason this movie seems to exist is because someone needed to fill a hole in this year’s spooky season schedule with familiar franchise fodder.

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The Gist: NEW YORK CITY, 1965. Terry (Garner) practices her jazz hands and tongue twisters in preparation for her performance in what appears to be an Off Broadway musical. She sings, she dances, she leaps, she lands with a sickening crack of her ankle. A few months later, she’s known infamously in the biz as The Girl Who Fell. Her ankle bends all rubbery when she walks and her mailbox is full of past due bills and her auditions are just… wobbly. She pops pills to mask the pain, which ain’t good, of course. She auditions for a chorus gig and the cruel creep of a casting director makes her perform the same jump over and over and over and over again until her ankle gives out, while producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess) watches. Humiliating. Just humiliating.

Terry gulps a couple extra downers to cope with the embarrassment and follows Marchand to his building but ends up throwing up and passing out on the sidewalk. She awakens in a strange bed in Apartment 7A, where the Castavets live – Minnie (Wiest) and Roman (Kevin McNally), an older, childless couple who picked her up and made sure she was OK. They listen to her story and offer her the neighboring apartment they own, for free. They have a lot of money and nothing to spend it on and just like to help people out, especially young women like Terry who need a leg up. Minnie and Roman are soooooo nice. Too nice. Impossibly nice! Red flags, anyone? But Terry takes them at their word and doesn’t bother to ask what strings might be attached to this too-good-to-be-true deal. Shoulda looked the gift horse in the mouth, Terry!

Marchand is the Castavets’ neighbor. Minnie sets up Terry for a date with the guy at his place, and he makes her a cocktail that knocks her right out. She has terrible surreal nightmares and awakens to Marchand’s smiling face, a cup of espresso, a promise of last night being a one-time deal (if you know what I mean) and a gig in the chorus for the musical. Terry still teeters on that ankle, and her catty costars think she slept her way into the job, but she’s getting a paycheck now at least. And the Castavets know so many helpful folks – the old lady with mysterious ointment that magically heals Terry’s ankle, and the obstetrician who gives our protag his card in case she ever needs it. Will she need it? You’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby , so of course she’ll need it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The First Omen was a far more effective and relevant prequel to a beloved horror film. Doctor Sleep comes to mind, in the sense that we’re all a little surprised that anyone would even attempt to add to the canon of a true creepout classic. Shade of Black Swan here too, especially in those highly competitive dance-rehearsal sequences.

Performance Worth Watching: Garner proves her mettle – in a movie that really doesn’t deserve her – when delivering a wrenching monologue, in closeup, about the passion that drives Terry to dance.

Memorable Dialogue: Minnie offers words of wisdom: “It’s not our falls that define us. It’s what you do afterwards.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond implied sexual assault.

Our Take: Apartment 7A is an almost-just-fine mediocrity that can’t quite get over the hump to justify its existence. It manufactures its own irrelevance by too closely mirroring the story beats of Rosemary’s Baby , and succumbs to the visual blandness of so many underbudgeted straight-to-streaming slabs of soon-to-be-forgotten franchise IP. The why of it all just sticks in my craw. The cynical take is, it exists to lure one to Paramount+ to be disappointed in it, but also inspired to watch something better that’s in the same menu scroll, like, I don’t know, the original Rosemary’s Baby , perhaps? And maybe nudging one towards an all-timer of a film isn’t a bad thing at all?

The film strikes me as mid-century cosplay trying to pass as a detailed period film, and the only time it grazes in subtextually consequential fields is when Terry navigates the literal backalleys of the era in a quest to abort the child (which, notably, she doesn’t yet know is the Satanspawn). And even then, the likes of Call Jane and Happening have traversed that territory far more effectively. Garner grabs and throttles moments here and there, lending nuance to a character who’s a Nebraska girl in New York desperate to dance her way to fame. But director Natalie Erika James has to fight against our preexissting knowledge of how this all will turn out, and therefore struggles to stir up much tension or dread. The mixed-feelings ending exhibits some verve and vigor the movie mostly lacked previously, but by then, it’s too late.

Our Call: This child o’ Hell is stillborn. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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