Did Terry Gionoffrio jump, or was she pushed? Of all the ill omens throbbing away in the plot of Roman Polanski’s Satanic masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby, the sudden death of Minnie and Roman Castevet’s lodger is one whose full, chilling significance takes a while to bed in.
Terry, played in the Polanski film by Victoria Vetri, is the vivacious young woman encountered by Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse in the Bramford Building’s laundry room, who tells her a gladdening tale of having been “picked up off the sidewalk, literally” and given a home by that sweet old couple upstairs.
A short while later, she’s being picked up off the sidewalk again – after having plunged directly onto it from the window of the Castevets’ seventh floor apartment. The reaction of Ruth Gordon’s Minnie when she arrives on the scene is, I’ve always felt, spine-curlingly sinister. This dotty old bird isn’t heartbroken or confounded by the young woman’s death. She’s irked.
The gap leading up to this moment didn’t have to be plugged, but since Hollywood abhors a narrative vacuum, it has been anyway – with surprising style and poise – by this watchable prequel now streaming on Paramount Plus. Directed and co-written by Natalie Erika James, whose Alzheimer’s-inspired horror Relic improved 2020’s locked-down Hallowe’en no end, it tells a slightly adjusted version of Terry’s story, from shortly before her arrival at the Bramford in 1965 to her swift, gravity-assisted departure.
Pluckily played by Ozark’s Julia Garner, Terry is no longer a junkie but an aspiring dancer from Nebraska, who visits the apartment block in the hope of meeting Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess), a Broadway impresario with a chorus line to cast.
