Tag Archives: Rosemary’s Baby

The Tough Monthly Review of November 2024

Posted on by
5

Some months, I find it easy to know how to title or theme this monthly review. Other times, it’s tough to come up with an idea.

Yeah.

Anyway, on with the regular stuff…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#86 Lee (2023) — New Film #10
#87 Inside Out 2 (2024) — New Film #11
#88 The Seventh Victim (1943) — Failure #11
#89 Duel to the Death (1983) — Genre #9
#90 Blitz (2024) — Wildcard #10
#91 The Cranes Are Flying (1957) — Blindspot #11
#92 Dragons Forever (1988) — Genre #10
#93 First Knight (1995) — Rewatch #11


  • I watched 11 feature films I’d never seen before in November.
  • Seven of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • I’d hoped to get to #95 this month, which is the maximum I could by the end of November (because five categories have a “one per month” limiter in their rules). Still, only having seven left for December feels manageable.
  • Perhaps more importantly: reaching #90 means I’ve already beaten how far I made it in 2022’s Challenge (which I chose to abandon at #89).
  • And reaching #93 means I’ve also beaten 2023 (which I didn’t consciously abandon, although I stood no serious chance of achieving it at this point that year, when I entered December with 17 films still to go).
  • Shockingly, I almost made it all the way through the Martial Arts Genre category without properly including Jackie Chan (although he did feature in the clip-based documentary I watched as the category’s first film). With hundreds of films to choose from to finish off the category, making sure to include Chan properly seemed as good a deciding factor as any; although Letterboxd’s new list-stats feature showed me even that left 40 films to pick from. I chose Dragons Forever because it co-stars fellow big names Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, and was the trio’s final collaboration. That seemed like a fitting end-cap for the year.
  • More importantly: this is the first year I’ve actually completed the Genre category! (Though, as a caveat, I did watch 11 (out of 12) films for it in 2022, which would’ve been enough to meet the reduced count of 10 in 2023 and 2024.)
  • After reading ghostof82’s review, I found I had the passion* to make it happen**, and so watched Flashdance. It didn’t qualify for the Challenge, but I felt like mentioning it.***
    * a vague interest that wasn’t there before
    ** watch a film that was available on a streamer I’m already subscribed to
    *** just so I could repeat this quote/footnotes joke from my Letterboxd.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was Russian wartime drama The Cranes Are Flying.
  • No WDYMYHS films this month, even though I should have watched two. I’m at the pointy end of the IMDb Top 250 now, with all the films I’ve not already got round to for one reason or another; usually length or seriousness of subject. Getting through three of those in December — when the vibes are Christmassy joy, and so much time is consumed with family activities — is going to be the most challenging aspect of completing my Challenge.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched The Seventh Victim.



The 114th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
There were several strong contenders this month, and several where the difference between “best” and “favourite” may have come into play. Ultimately, I think the answer is probably the same either way, because I’m going to select Russian World War 2 drama The Cranes Are Flying — not the most fun film I watched this month, nor necessarily the one I’d rewatch soonest, but surely the most accomplished.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
I suspect I’m broadly politically aligned with Ken Loach, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed The Old Oak. Sure, its storylines are worthy and its ultimate perspective correct, but it’s still heavy-handed, borderline amateurish, and occasionally a tough watch (as soon as the cute little dog encountered the barely-controlled bully breeds, I knew where that subplot was going).

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
Since I’ve brought them back (albeit at the current rate of one a month — maybe I’ll manage to increase that in 2025?), film reviews have consistently outshone monthly reviews; and so it is this month too, with my review of Rosemary’s Baby the clear victor from November’s new posts.



Every review posted this month, including new titles and the Archive 5


Will it be third time lucky? I failed my new-style Challenge in its first two years, but this time I’m closer than ever. We’ll find out sometime in the next 31 days…

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Posted on by
Reply
Roman Polanski | 138 mins | UHD Blu-ray | 1.85:1 | USA / English | 18 / R

Rosemary's Baby

If you came to Rosemary’s Baby without any kind of context about its place in film history, you might well conclude it had been made in the last few years. Well, if you learnt about it on paper — visually, it’s obviously a film of the’60s thanks to its cinematography and production design (not a criticism; indeed, if anything, that’s praise). But in terms of its plot, its themes, its characters and their relationships, and what they might be signifying, that all feels quite ‘of the moment’. Maybe it did in the ’60s too. Maybe it has in every time period since — maybe that’s why the film has endured so well for over 50 years. (Plenty of other films have endured just as long — and longer — without feeling pressingly relevant to the present day, so I don’t want to overemphasise that point too much.) If it had been made more recently, the usual blowhards would be decrying it as “woke” and that it debases the traditional family unit, or something. The fact you can apply such ‘arguments’ as readily to something made over half a century ago as you can to something produced today is just one reason they’re absolute bollocks. But I digress.

To dig deeper into what the film is saying about such things, and how and why, necessitates some spoilers. I know some people think it’s ridiculous to consider spoilers in the context of a film as old as this, but there are always new generations and more people coming afresh to any film decades later — heck, I’ve only just watched it; that’s the whole point of this. That said, Rosemary’s Baby is sort of a self-spoiling film. We all know it’s a horror movie, so when it starts out like a pleasant slice-of-life domestic drama about a young couple moving into a new apartment building, making friends with their quirky neighbours, and deciding to start a family… well, we already know that’s not all it’s going to be, and the hints at more sinister goings-on are easy to spot.

Rosemary's scream

This is another way one might argue it feels modern, as it’s close to the “elevated horror” sub-genre that’s sprung up in the past few years. Again, the fact works like this have existed since at least the ’60s — and I’m sure there are other horror movies that could be similarly classified — shows that so many “new” things have actually been around before, we’ve just forgotten them, or not bothered to label them. Basically, rather than being an outright schlocky genre movie, it’s restrained and dramatic and realistic (in tone, at least). There’s not even an early fake-out jump scare to reassure you you’re watching a genre piece, a trick employed by so many films where the real frights only come in later. There’s a conceivable version of this film where the big reveal is that everyone’s normal, Rosemary was paranoid, and you’ve been watching a mental health drama, and literally all you’d have to change for that to work is the events of the final few minutes.

Indeed, it’s interesting to sort of take a step back and almost-objectively consider this as “a horror movie”. There are very few (if any) scares, and it doesn’t create the same kind of uneasy irrepressible mood as something like The Shining; although I would wager it can have a different effect on women, especially women of childbearing age, than it does on me, because the horrors are that much closer to home. I don’t think it’s failing in those respects — it’s not setting out to terrify you and then failing to achieve it — I just think it’s going for a different kind of horror. It’s the slow realisation that something is not just ‘not right’ but definitely very wrong; and by the time you grasp the scale of it, it’s too late to do anything; and too insidious to convince anyone else that it’s real. In that sense, it really is a good analogy for things like toxic relationships that look fine to the outside world.

And that’s the way in which the film is most modern, as I was saying at the start. Its central concerns seem to be issues of women’s bodily autonomy, controlling relationships, the way they isolate their victims and lead to abuse. If you want to close your senses to such unmissable subtext, I guess you could still see the film as no more than a genre piece about (spoilers!) a cult trying to birth the Antichrist, but I think you’d be burying your head in the sand to do so. Sure, the film doesn’t expressly call those elements out — doesn’t underscore them, or bluntly explain that’s what’s going on in modern terminology — but they’re inescapably in the mix. I do think that’s a difference between the film having been made in the late ’60s vs today: now, it would be hard to resist thoroughly leaning into those themes and making them more overt, because they’re things we’re much more aware of as a society, and much more concerned with combating. Again, it’s not that they’re exactly subtle here, but you get the sense some of the psychology involved was still not widely understood; that there perhaps wasn’t yet the agreed-upon terminology to explicitly call it out, other than to present it and show how negative it was.

Controlling relationships

All of which said, the timeliness or otherwise of the film’s concerns is irrelevant to its overall quality. As much as it would be a key point of interest to some, I’m sure it’s of no matter to others. Either way, though, Rosemary’s Baby remains a compelling story because of how it grounds its supernatural goings-on in day-to-day life. Without playing the “is it or isn’t it” angle, it nonetheless renders them almost mundane — these devil-worshippers aren’t wearing robes, enacting elaborate arcane rituals in ancient stone circles in the British countryside: they’re modern-day Americans, living pretty typical lives in a New York apartment block. Horror can exist everywhere and anywhere; it is everyday. Oops, maybe we’ve come back round to making a sociological point again…

5 out of 5

Rosemary’s Baby is the 82nd film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024. It was viewed as part of Blindspot 2024. It was my Favourite Film of the Month in October 2024.

The Spooky Monthly Review of October 2024

Posted on by
5

I’ve never been one to go in for the whole “watch only horror movies in October” thing. I’m not enough of a fan of the genre to delight in the prospect of immersing myself in it for 31 days straight; and, while I’m sure I have more than enough qualifying titles I want to see to fill that period (probably several times over), there’s so much else to watch too. I don’t know if I’ve ever gone a whole October without watching a single horror movie (I haven’t bothered to go back and check), but the very fact I think it’s possible says all it needs to, I feel.

That said, this year I did make a bit of an effort — while also aiming to hit my remaining Challenge categories, of course. So, for example, I picked out martial arts horror movies to tick off slot(s) in the Genre category; for my Rewatch, I looked to horror movies I’d been meaning to revisit; and for Blindspot, I specifically saved the two horror titles for this month — they weren’t originally included for that purpose (if they had been, I would’ve only picked one), but it’s a fringe benefit.

Well, those were my plans, anyway. Did I meet them all, or did I drift somewhere along the way? Read on to find out…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#76 Attempt to Kill (1961) — Wildcard #7
#77 Man Detained (1961) — Wildcard #8
#78 Host (2020) — Failure #10
#79 Encounter of the Spooky Kind (1980) — Genre #7
#80 Erin Brockovich (2000) — Rewatch #10
#81 The Wages of Fear (1953) — WDYMYHS #9
#82 Rosemary’s Baby (1968) — Blindspot #9
#83 Dreadnaught (1981) — Genre #8
#84 Possession (1981) — Blindspot #10
#85 The Guest (2014) — Wildcard #9


  • I watched ten feature films I’d never seen before in October.
  • Eight of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with two rewatches.
  • I only ‘needed’ to get to #83 this month, so I’m currently ahead of schedule. More on why that’s especially beneficial right now in the “next month” section.
  • Outside of the Challenge, Encounter of the Spooky Kind was my 100th new film in 2024. That may not be my ‘official’ goal anymore, but hitting that milestone still feels worthy of note.
  • This month’s Genre films were both chosen because they were also labelled as horror films. Encounter lived up to it; Dreadnaught was a stretch (it’s sort of like a slasher movie, but only in a handful of individual sequences, not across the entire movie).
  • Three more Wildcards down, leaving just one for the final sixth of the year. I should have gone for a New Film on Halloween (I even had several horror options on hand), as I didn’t watch a 2024 release in October in the end, but I really fancied rewatching The Guest (which, if you don’t know, is set around Halloween, including a climax at the venue for a high school Halloween dance).
  • Possibly my most film-snob-y habit / opinion / whatever is that I insist on watching (feature) films on a TV (or at the cinema, obv). I don’t watch them on a computer; nor on a tablet; certainly not on a phone. But I made an exception for Host, because it’s such a ‘Zoom call’ movie that it kinda felt wrong to watch it on my TV when it was just as easy to watch it on my desktop (because it’s streaming on iPlayer).
  • This month’s Blindspot films were a pair of horror flicks I’d been saving especially for October, so I’m glad I got them both in. Specifically, they were Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession. Also, I’ve just realised they were both directed by Polish émigrés and about bad/abusive marriages. Coincidencetastic!
  • I didn’t have any outright horror films to choose for this month’s WDYMYHS viewing, but I went for The Wages of Fear because it has “fear” in the title — as good a reason as any, I guess.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched Host.



The 113th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
It was a largely middling month, quality-wise, which would often make this category hard, but in fact made it easy, because one new film I watched was actually great and so stood head and shoulders above the others — that being Rosemary’s Baby. (I just realised the award title doesn’t actually specify “new film”, but it should. If rewatches were eligible, The Guest would’ve walked it.)

Least Favourite Film of the Month
The flip side to (almost) everything being middling is that there was nothing outright terrible. The two I’d single out at the bottom of the barrel are Dreadnaught and Attempt to Kill. The latter takes it because, although it’s not bad, it is thoroughly mediocre from beginning to end; and while I didn’t actually care for a lot of Dreadnaught, at least it has some fantastic sequences.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
There was only one film review to compete with my monthly summary and “failures” this month. Whether or not the fact it was for an acclaimed film by a beloved director had any bearing on the post’s success, I don’t know; but either way, the victory goes to Incendies.



Every review posted this month, including new titles and the Archive 5


Just two months of the year remain, and I feel like I need to be tactically-minded to complete my goals — after all, I failed in my New 100 Films Challenge in both its first and second years, so perhaps a different focus is needed to get it over the line this time.

On the bright side, I’m currently ahead of target pace, which is potentially a big bonus. That should go without saying as a general point, but it’s specifically the case with regard to the end of December. The final weeks of the year are a bad time to be trying to catch up, or even stay on target, as Christmastime family commitments make it trickier to watch films (especially specific films, as opposed to “what can we find to appease everyone?”) If I can get further ahead of target in November, that might enable me to push through the final few Challenge films in early December. According to the rules, December could be left with a minimum of five films (a new film, a rewatch, a ‘failure’ from November, plus the twelfth films from Blindspot and WDYMYHS) — if I can get to #95 by the end of November, that would be super.

All of which said, I don’t want to ‘gamify’ my film viewing too much, because that tick-box mentality is not the right way to approach art. But it’s been my attitude (for almost 18 whole years now) that if having these goals pushes me to watch a film, rather than spending another evening deciding it would be easier to just veg on social media or whatever, that can only be a good thing.