[COLUMN] Apartment 7A is About 'the Girl Who Fell | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for both Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Natalie Erika James’ Apartment 7A. Both are streaming on Paramount+, and are well worth a watch. Also note that this piece contains discussions of real-life sexual violence.

Terry Gionoffrio (Victoria Vetri) is a minor character in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, effectively a cautionary tale and potential red flag for the story’s protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow).

Terry is a pregnant young woman in the care of elderly couple Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer), living with them in the Bramford apartment building in New York City. Terry is, by her own account, “their guest, sort of.” The Castevets took her in off the street when she was “starving, on dope and a lot of other things.” Rosemary, a new arrival at the Bramford, only has a brief interaction with Terry in the basement, confusing her with “Victoria Vetri, the actress.”

Just two scenes after this conversation, Rosemary is shocked to find Terry lying dead in the street outside the apartment building. The pregnant lady seemingly fell to her death. Fifteen minutes into the movie, Terry is gone. The film never completely explains what happened to her, leaving the audience several possible interpretations of events that are shaded by the narrative that follows, in which the Castevets are revealed to be Satanists trying to birth the Antichrist into the world.

It seems clear that Terry was an earlier subject in this grim experiment, a vehicle for this monstrous plan. After Terry’s death, the cult turns its attention to Rosemary. There remains some uncertainty within the film itself. Did Terry jump or was she pushed? Did Terry discover the plot and take her own life in horror or did the Castevets decide that Rosemary was a more viable candidate than a recovering drug addict and so cut Terry’s pregnancy short?

Over the course of the film, Rosemary is haunted by strange dreams that seem to have been conjured from overheard conversations that lean more towards the former explanation – “I told you not to tell her in advance! I told you she wouldn't be open-minded!” – but the film never delved too deeply into the particulars of Terry’s relationship with the Castevets. It’s more effective and more unsettling that way. Terry is ultimately just foreshadowing, a warning that Rosemary completely ignores.

Terry (now played by Julia Garner) is the protagonist of Natalie Erika James’ Apartment 7A, a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby. Obviously, Rosemary’s Baby was a novel written by Ira Levin before it was adapted to film by Roman Polanski, but Polanski’s movie remains a towering accomplishment in the horror genre, albeit one thornily intertwined with the long-overdue reckoning over the crimes of its director. James has talked about the challenges of approaching such “a classic and seminal film.”

Apartment 7A works quite well as a horror movie on its own terms. It is recognizable as part of the recent wave of post-Dobbs horror movies about pregnancy and women’s bodily autonomy, a subgenre that includes Immaculate, The First Omen, Cuckoo and even Alien: Romulus. Of course, the original Rosemary’s Baby was itself understood as part of a larger shifting in contemporary national politics on abortion, premiering five years before Roe v. Wade.

Apartment 7A is much more aggressive in its reproductive politics. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is a young wife who wants a child. She adheres to certain patriarchal norms. Apartment 7A suggests Terry is more liberated. She is a professional dancer, who is not in a steady or committed relationship. She reacts to her pregnancy with horror. “It’d be the end of everything I’ve been working towards,” she states. “I just worked too hard to get where I’m at to just throw it all away.”

When Terry confesses to the Castevets that she cannot afford to keep the child, the pair fall back on familiar anti-abortion rhetoric, proposing that she could give the child up for adoption. It’s a well-oiled pitch, with Roman (now Kevin McNally) opening the argument, “If there really is no room in your life for this baby, well…” Then Minnie (now Dianne Wiest) lands the offer, “We’ll make room in ours.” It is a sequence that feels very charged, bringing the politics of the original film to the surface.

Indeed, Apartment 7A even features a sequence in which Terry attempts to procure a dangerous back-alley abortion from Wei Wei (Tina Chiang). It is a much more aggressive framing of the reproductive anxieties that informed Rosemary’s Baby, updating the film for the modern world. In many ways, Terry is much less of a “perfect victim” than Rosemary was. She is ambitious. She is perhaps even selfish. She has her own wants and desires. She refuses to be demur or quiet. She doesn’t need to justify her desire for a termination beyond her own desire for it.

Apartment 7A is in conversation with Rosemary’s Baby. It understands the original film as a product of its time, reflecting the uncertainties of a turbulent era in American life. At one point, Roman reads a newspaper headlined with casualty reports from the Vietnam War. In one of Terry’s nightmares, he read another with the headline, “Is God Dead?” Terry wanders through the apartment overhearing reports of the Watts Riots, taken from real CBS news coverage.

Of course, the plot of Rosemary’s Baby – a young wife is impregnated with the child of the devil – is so deeply ingrained in popular culture that even people who have never seen the film or read the book understand the premise as a cultural shorthand – it’s similar to Pet Sematary in that way. Like Psycho or Soylent Green, the movie’s twist is now common knowledge. Most of Apartment 7A is built on the assumption the audience has seen – or at least knows the plot of – Rosemary’s Baby.

Indeed, the weakest moments in Apartment 7A involve the movie slowing down to bring some hypothetical viewer who has never heard the words “Rosemary’s Baby” up to speed. At the climax of the film, confused and disoriented in New York City, Terry seeks shelter in a church where she encounters a nun (Patricia Jones) who is conveniently and clumsily able to explain the entire plot of Rosemary’s Baby in a gigantic exposition dump, to make sure everybody is on the same page.

To its credit, Apartment 7A understands that Roman Polanski haunts any film in conversation with Rosemary’s Baby. It was a bizarre coincidence that the satanic leader in Levin’s original novel was named Roman. In hindsight, it is also strange that the movie’s first sacrificial victim should be named Terry. Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate would be murdered by the Manson family in August 1969, who perhaps stumbled across Tate while looking for record producer Terry Melcher.

Polanski is a convicted child rapist, who has fled justice in the United States to live in exile in Europe. While the director enjoyed the passive support of the Hollywood establishment for decades, the recent #metoo movement prompted a public discussion of Polanski’s legacy. Apartment 7A is very clearly a post-#metoo horror movie, focusing on Terry’s career within the theatre and the predatory interest shown in her by director Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess).

Early in the film, Alan arranges for Terry to visit his apartment, ostensibly to discuss the musical that he is staging. He plies her with alcohol and then drugs her, so that she can be impregnated with the cult’s satanic spawn. Without being too heavy handed, there are a number of overt parallels with Polanski’s rape of Samantha Jane Gailey, who was attending a photoshoot where he got her drunk and fed her a sedative before taking her to a bedroom and assaulted her.

Apartment 7A feels like a deliberate reclamation and interrogation of Rosemary’s Baby, constructed with an understanding of not just the plot and lore of the source material, but the context in which it existed. The movie’s storytelling is almost self-aware, particularly the way that it positions Terry in the context of her role in the original Rosemary’s Baby. This isn’t just a story about a minor character in that narrative, it is about what it means to be a minor character in a narrative like that.

Early in Apartment 7A, while rehearsing on stage, Terry fumbles a landing and damages her foot. It’s a potentially career-ending injury, one that seems likely to derail any dreams of stardom. This injury comes to define Terry. Over the course of Apartment 7A, she is repeatedly introduced and identified as “the girl who fell.” It’s very effective foreshadowing of her inevitable fate in Rosemary’s Baby, as a dead body on the pavement. It’s also a very clear invocation of how Terry is defined by that movie.

At its core, Apartment 7A is the story of a woman at the edge of the stage who wants – and perhaps even deserves – to take the spotlight. “You’re infamous,” Marchand observes. “Infamous?” Terry replies. “Wow. I’d prefer famous, but I’ll take what I can get.” Even when she attracts Marchand’s attention, she is initially marginalized, relegated to “the chorus line.” She is a background dancer, not even a featured player. She is a “disposable woman”, an interchangeable cog in the machine.

Terry longs to be a star. “I came here for one reason,” she explains of her journey to New York. “To dance. To make something of myself. To see my name in big lights.” Proposing a deal to keep the pregnancy, Minnie advises Terry, “Forget the chorus line, you’re wasted there. I know what you want. You want your name up in big flashy lights – on a big marquee!” In a very literal sense, Apartment 7A gives Terry what she wants. It takes a supporting player and makes her the star.

There is something very clever in this. Apartment 7A has to end with Terry’s death, falling from the Bramfort. It is an inevitability, even if the movie plays fast and loose with other aspects of continuity with Rosemary’s Baby. (Terry is not a drug addict, something the script makes a joke about in her first conversation with Minnie.) Part of the cleverness of Apartment 7A is the way in which it manages to work from that inescapable and predetermined conclusion and find some agency and choice for Terry, by telling her story. In its own way, Terry’s plunge is reclaimed as an expression - however desperate and tragic - of defiant bodily autonomy.

Apartment 7A foregrounds one of horror cinema’s most imperfect victims and disposable women, inviting the audience to revisit a classic from her perspective. Terry Gionoffrio finally gets her spotlight.