Review: Apartment 7A

Director:  Natalie Erika James

Stars:  Julia Garner, Jim Sturgess, Marli Siu

Around these parts, Natalie Erika James’ claustrophobic 2020 feature debut Relic was Kind Of A Big Deal™, enough to ensure that whatever came next from the Australian filmmaker would be de facto Essential Viewing. Even confirmation that it would take the form of a prequel to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby didn’t knock confidence, especially after some of the seriously surprising prequel work 2024 has already gifted us. There are good cases to be made, after all, that Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen and George Miller’s Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga are the peaks of their respective IPs. Might the same not somehow happen for James’ sophomore offering?

Taking place in the winter of 1965 and therefore preceding the events of Polanski’s film by roughly a year, Apartment 7A introduces us to Terry (Julia Garner), a hopeful chorus dancer laid low by an ankle injury. Sadistic powerplays between men and women are already of explicit concern when Terry kowtows to the cruel manipulations of a casting director asking her to repeatedly favour her bad ankle during an audition, eventually standing up for herself before the more imposing producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess).

Marchand, it transpires, lives in the fateful building where the Woodhouses will eventually reside and where Terry is promptly lured. Apartment 7A has no need for coyness. The satanic residents of that apartment block are well established, but James’ penchant for demonic leering and overt monstrosity lacks subtlety. Minnie and Roman Castevet – the neighbours from hell – are embodied here by Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally, and their work is sturdy. Still, the shadows of Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer loom large over the picture.

Garner is the main boon here of course – often the best player in whatever she’s cast in – and so it goes again. Her unhinged dance number at the movie’s finale reminds us we were robbed of her in the ill-fated Madonna biopic. For her part, James makes the most of the story’s more hallucinogenic episodes which manifest another stylishly sinister dance number in the tradition of Busby Berkeley complete with a striking glitter demon. But Apartment 7A struggles to avoid following the same footsteps as Rosemary’s Baby and winds up more of a straight retread than a worthy expansion of the material. It’s not long before the tannis root is being trotted out again…

Credit to James that she doesn’t fall into the trap of overtly aping the stylistic choices of the original, instead prioritising the development of her own eye. The production’s various art departments do the heavy-lifting to make this feel aesthetically of a piece with Rosemary’s Baby and its a fine effort on all fronts. Yet there’s a pedestrian quality to Apartment 7A that is both disheartening and suggestive of the notion that James’ heart isn’t fully in this. It often plays like a well-polished but ultimately soulless for-hire gig. A calculated (if faltering) step toward whatever might be next after this higher profile effort. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. One-for-them, one-for-me is a tried and tested route through the industry. Apartment 7A makes me optimistic that whatever’s next will be spikier, riskier, with more of James’ skin in the game.

Rosemary’s Baby predated the Roe v Wade ruling, so its daunting, paranoiac body horrors surrounding pregnancy made sense in a society that punished a woman’s right to choose. Is it such a coincidence that now the case has been overturned we’re revisiting these nightmares anew and that demonic pregnancies have dominated horror movies in 2024? It seems unfortunately inevitable that Apartment 7A will conjure comparison to the likes of Immaculate and The First Omen. It’s even more unfortunate that it falls short of both of these, too.