Stewart Thorndike

In 2014, two women-directed reimaginings of Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby hit the screen, marking a kind of unspoken yet important feminist reclamation of the story and its historical association with child rapist Roman Polanski’s famous 1968 film adaptation. While fellow Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland reset Levin’s horror classic in an updated Paris for her two-part NBC miniseries, Stewart Thorndike’s smaller indie feature Lyle presented a far less color-by-number version, but one with notably more punch. Reduced on more than one occasion to the handy descriptor “lesbian Rosemary’s Baby”, while not exactly inaccurate, this does a disservice to the powerfully intelligent and emotionally impactful way that Thorndike reworked the original story. Bad Things, the second film of Thorndike’s planned ‘motherhood’ trilogy, guarantees that Thorndike’s unfolding of ‘motherhood’ has been well worth the wait.