Rosemary's Baby (1968)
A young married couple moves into a New York apartment building with a dark reputation, where the wife becomes pregnant and begins to suspect that her neighbors are involved in a sinister plot around her unborn child. As her fears grow, the line between paranoia and reality becomes increasingly blurred.
Narrative Score
Full Plot & Ending Explained
Intro
Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband Guy move into the Bramford, an old Manhattan apartment building with a sinister reputation, after Rosemary’s friend Hutch warns them about its history of witchcraft and death. They meet the eccentric elderly neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet, while Rosemary also notices a strange young woman, Terry Gionoffrio, who has been living with the Castevets.
Turning Point 1
Terry is later found dead after apparently falling from the Castevets’ window, and Guy becomes increasingly friendly with Roman and Minnie, even as Rosemary finds them intrusive and unsettling. When Guy’s acting career suddenly improves after the main actor in a play is injured, he grows more confident and agrees with Rosemary that they should finally try for a baby.
Turning Point 2
That night Rosemary has a bizarre dreamlike experience after drinking a strange mousse prepared by Minnie; she feels herself being assaulted by a demonic presence while Guy, the Castevets, and the other tenants watch. The next morning she wakes with scratches on her body, and Guy dismisses the event by saying he had sex with her while she was unconscious, insisting this is how the pregnancy happened.
Turning Point 3
Once Rosemary is pregnant, the Castevets pressure her to stop seeing her own doctor, Dr. Hill, and instead go to their friend Dr. Abraham Sapirstein. During the pregnancy she suffers severe pain, loses weight, is fed foul-tasting drinks and raw meat, and becomes increasingly isolated as Guy and the Castevets control nearly every aspect of her life.
Turning Point 4
Rosemary starts to suspect that something is deeply wrong when her friend Hutch tries to warn her but is suddenly incapacitated, and later dies after leaving her a cryptic message about an anagram. Frightened, Rosemary searches for clues and becomes convinced that the Castevets, Guy, and Sapirstein are part of a Satanic conspiracy centered on her unborn child.
Turning Point 5
Near the end of her pregnancy, Rosemary goes into labor and is hurried into a fogged, hidden apartment room by the Castevets and Guy, where she is told the baby is dead. After hearing what sounds like a living infant crying, she discovers a secret doorway leading to the Castevets’ apartment and learns that the group has been hiding her child from her.
Ending
When Rosemary looks at the baby, she sees that he has the same unsettling eyes as the demonic figure from her earlier nightmare, and Roman tells her that the child is not Guy’s son but Satan’s son. Despite her horror, the other cult members urge her to take on a motherly role, and the film ends with Rosemary rocking the infant while the coven gathers around her.
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