Rosemary's Baby has a strange but stylish Italian cousin

Ultra slow burn with a handful of super fun moments, my favorite being a rabbit watching TV. Solid ending.

Soavi’s doing his “occult fairy tale” thing here, and it mostly works on a shot-by-shot level. You get gorgeous, unsettling tableaux animal masks, moody blue gels, cramped stone corridors strung together with dream logic that’s more mood than map. Pino Donaggio’s score slides between lullaby and dread, and the production design has that tactile, damp, Euro horror texture you can almost smell. If you like movies you feel more than follow, this scratches the itch. Where it stumbles is coherence and rhythm. The lore piles up (prophecy threads, cult rules, symbolic animals) but doesn’t click into a satisfying throughline, so momentum stalls between the knockout set pieces. Kelly Curtis keeps it grounded and Herbert Lom brings veteran menace, but the script keeps drifting away from character toward “what if we did another striking image.” It’s the type of film where your memory latches onto two or three set-pieces (that bath/well moment, the ritual reveal) and lets the connective tissue fade. On disc, Severin’s restoration does the movie a favor: grain looks natural, colors have room to breathe, and the extras help explain why the choices are the way they are useful context for a film that can feel like a beautiful puzzle missing a couple corner pieces. Net: worth a spin for the imagery and atmosphere, docked for story fog and pacing lumps. If you vibe with The Church or late-period Argento aesthetics, you’ll probably enjoy the ride even if the destination is fuzzy.