Opiniões dos críticos

Polanski, for all his insanity about women and sexuality, nailed the putrid plight of the twentieth century woman, and, let’s face it, 21st century women too. Besides its unparalleled aesthetics–young Farrow alone!–that liberationist rage is why I clamor to the film again and again.

It's one of my favorite horror movies, and probably one of yours, too, though it now seems much closer to 60s/70s paranoia thrillers than it does to today's horror flicks. This also means Rosemary's Baby faces the obstacle that all paranoia thrillers face: namely, we figure out what's going on long before the hero(ine), and then have to wait for them to catch up. But that's just the raw framework, and Rosemary's Baby hangs on it a richly detailed story

It's like being stuck in a satanic vortex of mansplaining where you're going to have to accept your devil child or run far, far away just to get these people to stop talking AT YOU… Well, for Rosemary, the love of the child supersedes devil worshipers, the medical profession and her terrible husband, and she will accept her newborn, no matter what they've done to his eyes. It's, in the end, heartbreaking and extremely touching.

For a horror film, Polanski's storytelling is exceedingly delicate, as is the sparingly used sublime music by Krzysztof Komeda. There are hints of Satanic madness, but the film can also be read as a parable of what's most sinister about motherhood and marriage.

The chocolate mousse with the "chalky undertaste" is of course Polanski's mise en scène, a Ross Hunter-type gloss cannily deformed by anxiety and the gnomish grins of familiar Hollywood faces... The finale envisions a sardonic Nativity tableau, with the camera briefly panning from the blasphemous proclamations to hilariously notice Gordon's irritation at a huge knife dropped on her nice wooden floor.

What seems like a casting stunt at first [adding Patsy Kelly to the film] is actually part of an adept strategy of misdirection; more than perhaps any other horror movie of its time, aside from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Polanski was able to convincingly demonstrate that the banality of the everyday can act as the perfect cloak for the sinister and demonic.

The brilliance here—a fair amount of it due to novelist Ira Levin, also of The Stepford Wives—is diversion: Who actually expects the devil in the details? Hollywood trembled after this film came out—they couldn't go back to Transylvania anymore. Fear was all around us, and the better thrillers have kept it there.

The pace is leisurely; the sense of dread is constant. Getting the maximum frisson out of empty apartments and isolating phone-booths, Polanski was one of the few Hollywood directors since ‘40s B movie master Val Lewton to construct a horror film around the power of suggestion—indeed "Rosemary's Baby" is a worthy successor to "The Seventh Victim", Lewton's own terrific little movie about a Manhattan witch-coven.

Rosemary's Baby is one of horror cinema's all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie's series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary's unraveling mental state. In other words, Polanski plants seeds of doubt as expertly as Rosemary believes the coven next door has arranged to snatch her baby from her to use in their rituals.

[Polanski's] use of unusual angles, framed from ceiling or ankle-level perspectives, and lingering over odd details, throws everything askew. There are times when the camera itself seems like a dark spirit, at the very least a bat flapping at 24 frames per second, suggesting, too, many J-Horror hauntings to come.

Following the tradition founded by Val Lewton in his 1940s horror films Mr. Polanski shows nothing and suggests everything. His direction seems to assume that the viewer has already read Ira Levin's best-selling novel and knows everything that is happening off screen, just beyond the perception of the victimized heroine (played with reedlike frailty by Mia Farrow).

It's a tribute to the film's remarkable rhythms and compelling there-ness that no matter the amount of times I've seen Rosemary's Baby, it manages to surprise and enthrall me, even though it ostensibly pivots on one mother of a twist. I would attribute this to its almost cheerful mundaneness. It is perhaps the greatest of horror films for being set palpably in our world.