Horrorfest 2024: Apartment 7A

Apartment 7A
Written by Natalie Erika James, Christian White and Skylar James
Directed by Natalie Erika James
Starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Jim Sturgess and Kevin McNally
USA, 2024

Before watching this prequel to ROSEMARY’S BABY, I chuckled at a Paste headline about it, something along the lines of “APARTMENT 7A imagines what it would be like if ROSEMARY’S BABY was bad.”

While that’s a brilliant headline, it’s not 100% accurate, because APARTMENT 7A has a couple moments worth noting. But in general, yes, it does fall into the trap where I kept going, “Yeah but later they had to do this all over again with Rosemary, so who cares.”

Normally I’m not the kind of guy who’s like, “What’s the point of a prequel, we know what’s going to happen.” That’s the same guy who goes, “What’s the point of TITANIC, we know it sinks.” No shit. What’s the point of any movie ever? As Aerosmith once said, life’s a journey, not a destination. In theory, any story’s worth telling as long as it keeps you entertained in one way or another.

That’s the biggest failing of this one, the tale of the girl who came before Rosemary – it’s boring. We learn this one’s a struggling dancer (Julia Garner) trying to make it on Broadway. She’s injured and suffers a setback, and a seemingly-kindly (if busy-body-ish) old couple (Diane Wiest and Kevin McNally) give her a place to stay in a building that just so happens to also house the very guy she wants to get in good with in order to “make it” (Jim Sturgess). Turns out they’re all devil worshippers using her as a vessel to give birth to the son of satan, though. Whoops!

The movie assumed I had more familiarity with ROSEMARY’S BABY than I do, so if you plan to watch it, I recommend re-watching ROSEMARY’S BABY either right before it, or right after it, to refresh yourself. I haven’t seen it in like 20 years or something so I missed out on a bunch of the moments where I was supposed to go, “Ohhhh!” 

I said earlier there are a couple moments that are worth it and one of them is towards the end. Without giving too much away there's a moment where our heroine decides the only way to be the master of her own destiny and the last thing she's going to do with her life is to dance. That dance may have been conceived in an attempt to try for a M3GAN or WEDNESDAY meme, and if that's the case, the movie failed. But, if they wanted one, solid, memorable, unique scene: they succeeded.