By: Brandon Wolfe
Though it isn’t as though the first part was intent on blazing its own trail, the second half of NBC’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ doesn’t color outside the lines at all. This veers uncomfortably close to Gus Van Sant ‘Psycho’ levels of slavishness. If you’ve seen the original 1968 ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, the second part of this miniseries will have you nodding your head in recognition as each development plays out almost precisely as it had before, with very little deviation.
We open with the aftermath of Rosemary’s night of passion with Guy, where she had demonic visions of witchcraft practitioner Steven Marcato as her actual partner. When she wakes the next morning confused about what has happened, Guy claims to have enjoyed their time together (and, in a sign-of-the-times change from 1968, Guy is apologetic about having his way with her when she didn’t have all of her faculties, something his 1968 counterpart did not give a second thought to). Rosemary soon learns that she has become pregnant, and though her close friend Julie recommends an obstetrician named Dr. Bernard (with whom Julie once had a fling, prompting the memorable assurance “He really knows his way around a vagina”), Rosemary is guided toward the reputed Dr. Saperstein at the Castevets and Guy’s behest. From there we are treated a Greatest Hits compilation of things that happened in the original film happening all over again, in the same way. Rosemary again receives tannis root smoothies from the smotheringly pushy Mrs. Castevet. She again experiences terrible abdominal pain that is brushed off by her doctor. She even gets an impromptu pixie haircut, even though that only happened in the original because Mia Farrow didn’t want to wear a wig over her short Vidal Sassoon hairdo the entire time. This ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ sticks to the script like nobody’s business.
We do get a better sense of where Guy’s head is at than we received in the first two hours. He is indeed in league with the Castevets in a bid to further his writing career, but where the John Cassavetes version of the character was never shown to have given a second thought to selling his wife, unborn child and all of humanity down the river, this one is allowed to be bitterly conflicted about his decision, and spiteful toward Roman Castevet for his role in making it. But his regret isn’t too overpowering, as he does steal Julie’s earring to use as part of a hex designed to get her out of the picture, lest her influence skew Rosemary away from the path her puppet masters mean to keep her on.
The death of Julie illustrates an area where ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ errs, and where many contemporary horror films err. Julie’s counterpart in the original film was an elderly friend named Hutch, who comes to the aid of Rosemary and provides her information about the coven her associates belong to. The hex placed on Hutch merely left him in a coma that he never recovered from. It was a simple yet eerie development. But the hex leveled on Julie takes the form of an elaborate ‘Final Destination’ stunt, where she is made to slip and crack her head open in the restaurant kitchen where she works, as blood gushes graphically from the wound. This just looks silly, and functions as a means to shoehorn in some gruesomeness in where it doesn’t belong. A similarly bloody fate befalls a police commissioner named Fontaine, whom Rosemary turns to for help and who briefly becomes an exposition spouting ally (he and Julie essentially function as two vessels for the roles Hutch played all by himself in the original) before he is smeared all over the pavement by a cement truck. There is also the inclusion of a pointlessly nasty bit where Rosemary hungrily devours raw chicken organs, making it clear that the miniseries finds it much easier to disgust rather than frighten us.
‘Rosemary’s Baby’ then follows the path to its conclusion with no surprises. An attempt to turn to Dr. Bernard for help is thwarted by the seeming craziness of Rosemary’s claims, placing her back into Guy and Saperstein’s custody. The baby is delivered and taken from her, with the ruse of miscarriage put in place before she hears its cries emanating from a secret room located in a closet. And in that room, she finds the entire coven, along with Guy, huddled around a crib, where she finally learns the truth about her baby, of which we’ve known for decades: that it is the son of Satan. But a mother’s love overcomes all, so she opts to raise it as her own in spite of everything. Again, this is all how it went down in Polanski’s film, but the lone difference (other than the implication that Roman Castevet, the alias of Steven Marcato, is the devil in disguise, as opposed to the mere acolyte he was in the film) is that we are shown the baby here. In the film, its appearance was left to our imagination, fueled only by Rosemary’s horrified reaction to it and her frenzied cry of “What’s wrong with its eyes?!” Well, we see what’s wrong with its eyes here. They’re very, very blue, similar to those of Marcato/Roman’s. It otherwise looks like a completely normal baby. After so much reverence, the miniseries botches the most haunting moment of its forbear.
I couldn’t say what the point of the ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ remake was. Even by the usual remake standards, it comes across as wasted time and effort. There was almost certainly a way to retell this story in some modern way to make it different and relevant, perhaps incorporating contemporary issues of reproductive rights into the mix, but that would have been work. Much easier to do essentially a copy-and-paste job of work that has already been done. Producing an identical yet vastly inferior version of something that already exists has always felt an obnoxiously meaningless pursuit, but when applying this approach to a stone-cold classic like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, it feels especially egregious. Some ideas are so sinister that they should never be allowed to come to term.
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