Stop reading this review right now if you want to enjoy ANY part of this movie. Seriously, I am not aiming to spoil anything, but Apartment 7A should be much more enjoyable for those who know absolutely nothing about it until they start to piece the familiar elements together for themselves.
Consider yourself duly warned.
Julia Adams plays a young dancer named Terry. Despite a hunger for career success, Terry ends up injuring herself in a way that could possibly spell the ruination of her dream. Terry, aiming to find ways to get herself in front of the right people and grasp whatever last opportunity she might get, does have one apparent stroke of good luck. She encounters an elderly couple (played by Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally) who end up offering her somewhere to stay, as well as much more. But what do they want in return?
Directed by Natalie Erika James, who has done much better work elsewhere, and also co-written by James, Christian White, and Skylar James, this is a disappointingly unscary and predictable feature that is seriously hampered by the fact that viewers will know where things are going. If you somehow avoided the poster/marketing imagery, which clues you in on the fact that this is a prequel to what many view as a classic horror, and somehow don’t recognise the names and behaviour of the characters helping our lead, then there’s a chance that you might enjoy this a bit more. I suspect you will still find it quite dull though, and it’s a shame that none of the writers could figure out a way to make this anything more than a pale and insipid tribute to the film that birthed it.
Despite the weak material they have to work with, the cast are almost all doing very good work. Adams is a good lead, even if this isn't her best work, but a number of scenes are completely stolen by Wiest and McNally (with Wiest, in particular, reminding me of how much I miss her in major movie roles). Jim Sturgess is decent, playing the man who can make or break Terry's dancing career, and Marli Siu, playing a friend named Annie, gets to continue building a nicely varied filmography of interest to those who took notice of her about a decade ago.
There is at least one other recent horror movie that this reminded me of, and I didn't like that one either (The First Omen), BUT this is a slight improvement. Maybe it's because my memory of Rosemary's Baby is a bit hazy (yes, this is a prequel to Rosemary's Baby, I did warn you not to read further if you didn't know anything about the film before now), or maybe there were a handful of moments here that didn't feel like people just marking off a checklist. Either way, this was watchable, but who would choose to ever rewatch it when you can just revisit Rosemary's Baby?
4/10
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