Julia Garner in 'Rosemary's Baby' Prequel

Immediately after Rosemary (Mia Farrow), the protagonist of the 1968 film Rosemary's Babyshe moves with her husband into the stately Renaissance-style building known as Bramford, where she meets Terry Gionoffri. Their meeting is brief but impactful.

Terry, played with infectious exuberance by Victoria Vetri, calms Rosemary's nerves about her recent move, reassuring her that the other occupants of the New York apartment are kind. In turn, Rosemary offers Terry hopeful companionship. The two promise to make their trips to the dry cleaners together, since neither can stand the spooky basement. Before they part, Terry tells Rosemary about the Castevets, an elderly couple who helped her through a difficult time. “I would have died if it weren't for them,” Terry says, “that's an absolute fact.”

By Paramount+ Apartment 7Adirected by Natalie Erika James (Relic), uses Terry to introduce a new generation of viewers to the terrifying universe of satanic cults and maternal purgatory first conjured up by author Ira Levin and further popularized by Roman Polanski’s intense film adaptation. James, who co-wrote the screenplay with Christian White and Skylar James, fills in Terry’s biography to explain her tragic fate and strengthen the bond between her and Rosemary. It’s less a prequel than a parallel story that continues to emphasize women’s limited autonomy. Restrictive social mores trap both Rosemary and Terry, albeit in different ways.

While Rosemary is married and toying with the idea of ​​having a child, Terry is a single woman trying to become a Broadway star. Apartment 7A opens with Terry (Julia Garner) preparing for her stage debut in a backstage dressing room. Excitement lights her eyes as the ingenue practices vocal warm-ups and puts the finishing touches on her makeup. The glimmer fades when Terry injures herself on stage. Unable to dance, she self-medicates with pills purchased from a local street performer and develops an addiction to painkillers. James depicts Terry's descent into addiction with a laconic efficiency that initially accommodates the slow pace of the narrative.

Without a job, Terry turns to her friend Annie (Marli Siu) for support. Another rejection catapults the wounded artist into a deeper depression. Terry becomes so desperate that she follows Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess), the producer of her latest audition, to his home in the Bramford, hoping to convince him to give her another chance. But the doorman fires Terry at the front desk, and minutes later, she collapses on the pavement outside.

The plot picks up when Minnie (an excellent Dianne Wiest) and Roman Castevet (Kevin McNally) rescue Terry. But the tone remains strangely mellow, not quite inspiring the creeping dread of Polanski's adaptation, nor the nervous dread often overused in contemporary horror offerings. Part of the blame may lie in attempts to reconcile Terry's reality with his star aspirations. James includes a series of musical sequences, usually when Terry is between waking and sleeping. But these fever dreams end up more as exaggerated interruptions than as surreal, heightened uneasiness. They also take away the subtlety of Apartment 7Athe message is more sober.

The film is desperate to impress upon the audience that by accepting the Castevets' generosity, Terry has taken on the role of a lifetime. The details of this position become clearer after the ballerina moves into the vacant unit next to the elderly couple. They begin to orchestrate Terry's life so that he will eventually land a role in a big play and worry less about money. But all that “free” comes with a trade-off. Morning sickness pushes Terry toward pregnancy, and a visit to a clinic confirms it. Before Rosemary carried the child of the antichrist, Terry had. Apartment 7A does not investigate that fateful meeting between the two women in Rosemary's Babybut their interaction remains in the shadows, a reminder of the depravity of the inhabitants of Bramford.

Inheriting the role from Vetri, Ozarks star Garner infuses the bubbly Terry with darker undertones. She finds a certain complexity in her ambition, which pushes the character even further into the Castevets’ arms. There’s a confident effort on Garner’s part to do more with the part, but there’s still a distance between the audience and Terry.

Wiest comes ever closer to bridging that gap with her character. She modulates her performance so that Minnie’s personality slowly shifts from oppressive warmth to abrasive insistence. One of the strongest scenes involves Minnie cutting Terry’s hair and communicating that the dancer will never be smarter than she is. Aside from the final scene, Garner and Wiest are at their best in this intensely nail-biting moment. As Minnie’s grip tightens on Terry’s hair, the terms of their deal become devastatingly clear: a baby for fame.

Through Terry's pregnancy, the film, similar to Rosemary's Babyunderscores themes of bodily autonomy. James's film is particularly compelling in post-Roe America, when recent headlines about punitive abortion laws have given it an urgent political edge, so it's a shame that its energy doesn't always match its relevance. Annie and Terry's conversations raise the stakes, as does Terry and Minnie's increasingly adversarial relationship, but most Apartment 7A It seems too soft for his messages.