Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban currently dominates Rosemary's Baby 94–6

The Verdict Decades Apart

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The Whomping Willow marking the passage of seasons — bare to leafy to snow-covered in a thirty-second montage — is Cuarón announcing that this Potter film will treat time as a formal element rather than a plot convenience, which pays off magnificently when the Time-Turner restructures the film's final act. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby builds its horror from domestic details so small they barely register: the vitamins taste wrong, the herb garden smells too strong, the neighbors know the baby's name before Rosemary tells them. Both directors are masters of accumulation. The gap says Cuarón's temporal accumulation outperforms Polanski's domestic accumulation when the margin is this wide.