APARTMENT 7A
***/****
starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Kevin McNally, Jim Sturgess
screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James
directed by Natalie Erika James
THE FIRST OMEN
***½/****
starring Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas
directed by Arkasha Stevenson
by Walter Chaw The sense of dread in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Richard Donner’s The Omen originates from the sacrifice of anonymous young women, dead before the stories proper begin. They are the black grasping soil, the damned ritual cycle from which feelings of claustrophobia and destiny extend backwards into an infinite past and forwards into an inevitable future. These dead girls give the stories a sense of eternity, in other words, and the feeling of inescapability. I love that the latest entries in these peculiar franchises are by women. About a third of the way through Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, two concentric circles of novitiates sing and dance around troubled young Carlita (Nicole Sorace) like pagans around a maypole while above them a nun, Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson), sets herself on fire after promising her immolation is “all for you!” For whom, it’s not clear. Possibly Carlita, the red herring of the film’s first half and the obvious source of demonic visitation at the Italian convent in which the film is set, where inexperienced Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) is assigned, fresh from America like Suspiria‘s Suzy Bannion. Or maybe Sister Anjelica’s messy end is meant for Sister Margaret as a strange welcome or a dire warning. “Ring Around the Rosie” was created to teach us about the symptoms of the Black Death. I don’t know what sort of death the circling children are teaching in The First Omen, though it doesn’t matter nearly so much as Stevenson’s absolute command of the unsettling, uncanny image and the ineffable gravity of archetype.
A string of dancers encircles aspiring hoofer Terry (Julia Garner), too, ecstatic in their gyrations as she launches herself into the air and catches her toe on landing, folding her ankle back in on itself like the snapping, splintering, dry and brittle death of a balsa-wood toy glider. With her dreams of Broadway stardom on indefinite hold, Terry is evicted from an apartment she shares with some fellow dancers and finds herself one day under the good graces of Roman and Minnie Castevet (Kevin McNally and Dianne Wiest), who offer her an empty flat in the historic Bramford building free of charge. Its name, “Bramford,” is a play on the author of Dracula from Rosemary’s Baby novelist Ira Levin, who, I have to imagine, wanted to place his narrative in the literary tradition of the woman’s Gothic. The labyrinthine, cloying Bramford is, after all, as key a main character in Rosemary’s Baby as it is now in Natalie Erika James’s prequel, Apartment 7A.
The desire for stardom that drives Rosemary’s betrayal in Rosemary’s Baby is transferred from her husband to Terry, who schemes to convince hotshot director Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess) to let her into the Big Show. Terry intends to seduce him. She doesn’t intend to be drugged and raped but, as she’s in the show regardless, she swallows her violation as the devil’s bargain she engineered. The ends for her justify even these means. I admire the courage to have a character like Terry, who rationalizes her victimization as a price this profession, in this culture, too often demands. It’s not that she’s complicit, but rather that she’s not fully the victim. She is Leda to Satan’s Swan, taking on his power with his corruption of her. Terry reminded me at times of Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face, walking a tightrope, calculating every step towards glory against a swift fall into oblivion. Garner is very good at playing sharp. Watch her face when a rival dancer calls her out for sleeping her way to the top–mark all these conflicting emotions playing out in a silent moment: outrage, shame, defiance, pride. When Minnie gives Terry some foul ointment to make her bad ankle miraculously sound again, well, why ask questions when a bit of black magic helps her show the doubters she’s paid her dues?
I’ve always considered Rosemary’s Baby a film only a predator could make. The decision to have a woman tackle its prequel focuses questions of consent in this premise, not strictly in the forced insemination (rape is rape), but also in the social imperative to keep the pregnancy despite all indications the baby is “wrong” and the mother’s life is in danger. Terry, like Rosemary, is seen by a coven of Antichrist-breeding witches as little more than an incubator for a seed. Once her role is complete, the traditionally preferred outcome is for the biological mother to be maternal, though given the cadre of willing caregivers should she decline or, indeed, die in the process of childbirth, the mother’s participation isn’t mandatory. In a certain fundamentalist worldview, after all, children are special, and mothers are by definition whores. Terry is horrified that she’s pregnant, less because she thinks at that point it’s the Devil’s child than because it will impact her ability to pursue a career as a dancer. She visits back-alley abortionist Wei Wei (Tina Chiang) and, in a tense film’s most shocking moment, discovers that her baby has the means to protest its termination. Casting the abortionist as Asian recalls Ernest Harada’s grinning Japanese photographer in Rosemary’s Baby as well as, in a more general sense, Polanski’s Chinatown orientalism. The intrusion of the “oriental”–the strange, extralegal, and mystical–in the middle of quotidian Manhattan centres Apartment 7A in a particular stylistic state of mind that relies on old superstitions and prejudices for its horror.
Terry, unlike Rosemary, is a dedicatedly single woman, uninterested in domesticity, unshy about using her sexuality, and determined to pursue a career that has left her estranged from her small-town Nebraskan family. In her defiance, she is a direct threat to the patriarchy. When auditioning for the role she ultimately finds a side entrance into, she’s forced to re-enact, repeatedly, the move that resulted in her injury, and despite her fear and pain, she does it over and over again. When asked to rut around the stage like one of the pigs on the farm she’s fled, however, she tells her tormentors she’ll do anything for the opportunity, but she won’t humiliate herself for their pleasure. Apartment 7A is a workplace thriller in the same way The Silence of the Lambs is a workplace thriller. Terry is a small woman in the company of wolves, unable to trust those who should be her mentors and teachers, parental figures and allies. At the end of it (which is the beginning of Rosemary’s Baby), when Minnie and Roman nod to each other upon deciding meek, domestic Rosemary (Amy Leeson) is the correct next target for their infernal attention, what they’re communicating is how their mistake in picking Terry may have been in underestimating her determination to resist a socially-mandated, traditional role. That question of choice is a persistent one–and the real value of sequels, prequels, and remakes is how they can contextualize the source in its time and, in the process, contextualize ours as well.
The First Omen is similarly effective in telling a familiar tale from a woman’s point of view. Ostensibly about how Damien of Donner’s film is born and ready to go in time to replace the baby Ambassador Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife lost, it starts as a “creepy kid” flick with a feral little girl drawing weird pictures to the consternation of her handlers but soon becomes a surprisingly affecting survey of female relationships. There’s a scene early on where all of the older nuns in the nunnery are gathered around a meal, smoking and telling jokes about their wild days leading up to their “taking a vocation”–that is, committing to a life as a bride of the Christian God. It’s interesting to me how the nun’s required vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are, save for poverty, the same vows required of women during the Christian wedding ceremony. Hero Margaret is entering into the novitiate phase of her commitment, a period of living the life of a nun prior to taking final vows. She makes fast friends with fellow novitiate Luz (Maria Caballero), who, nearing the end of her relative freedom, takes occasional trips off the holy campus to visit Rome’s nightlife in scanty, form-flattering eveningwear. One wild night, she lets Margaret borrow a spangly little number, and the two immediately attract some locals with nothing good on their minds. Margaret wakes up the next morning in Luz’s room without any memory of the night before. She is, however, left with strange dreams and growing suspicions that the “creepy kid” Carlita might be the target of a plot to impregnate her with the Antichrist.
I’m moved by how both Apartment 7A and The First Omen see the act of being forced to carry a child of rape to term as akin to a vast conspiracy of religious zealots plotting to compel the birth of an unwanted baby. To carry a delicate metaphor right up against its breaking point, I like, too, how the baby, in each case, represents the end of the world as we know it. In The Omen saga, Damien eventually became President of the United States–the fulfillment of a plan begun by placing him in a seat of absolute privilege as an ambassador’s son who’ll be educated in the best private and prep schools money can buy. In Rosemary’s Baby’s television-movie sequel, there is the suggestion that the Antichrist is a dynastic title meant to be passed on to future generations, while Ira Levin’s book sequel, Son of Rosemary, opens with a bang as the Antichrist, now a charismatic cult leader, releases a world-ending virus, only to end with a whimper as Rosemary is given a second chance to save the world. Here, the Apocalypse is a matter of not fire-and-brimstone but bad politics and voter fatigue. The “rough beast” of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is the apathy of the well-intended set against the fervour of the worst of us, i.e., the religious nuts, the cultists, the political fascists seeking to drag the world back into the dark ages from whence all of their beliefs originate.
As Margaret takes on the role of protector for what she perceives to be an abused, possibly demonically influenced child, she begins having visions of horrific births presided over by nuns and the kindly Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy). She, again like Suzy from Suspiria (another film about a young woman coming into her power), becomes a detective: going through old files, piecing together arcane clues, and continuing to see apparitions no one else seems to notice. Without revealing more than I should, The First Omen ends with a stout declaration that if there is to be a future in the wake of these conspiracies of men, it must necessarily be female. I was stunned by how well The First Omen is constructed. Stevenson’s background in journalism and her previous focus on black-market top surgeries for the transgender community serve this, her debut, in grounding the supernatural aspects of the story in urgent current events. In one sequence set in a parking lot, she pays tribute to the subway freakout of Zulawski’s Possession while also understanding the body horror and possession potentials of a non-supernatural pregnancy. Stevenson knows her shit. She respects the genre, how its foundation is in the telling of simple cautionary tales about crossing barriers, losing control of your body, losing your sense of self. The devil is literally in the details, but the structure itself is timeless and simple. She presents a world in which women are king and men are ornamental interlopers brought in to sanctify a rite after all the groundwork has already been laid. As it should be. Wouldn’t we all be better off?
