Don’t Look Now (1973)

Don’t Look Now is an Italian-British horror film first released in 1973, directed by Nicolas Roeg.  The film is based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier and stars Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania and Massimo Serato.  It has also been released under the title: A Venezia.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


John and Laura Baxter are a young couple who are both profoundly traumatised when their five-year-old daughter Christine drowns accidentally at their home.   Deciding that a change of scene will do them both good, they head for Venice, where John finds work restoring a dilapidated Byzantine church.  With her husband busy, Laura allows herself to be befriended by two elderly English sisters, one of whom is blind and claims to have psychic powers.  Laura is intrigued when the blind woman reveals that she can still see Christine, dressed in the plastic red raincoat in which she died.  Although John is too ready to dismiss the two old women as cranks, he too experiences premonitions and is haunted by his precognisance of his daughter’s death.  The blind woman convinces Laura that she and her husband are in great danger and must leave Venice immediately.  John remains sceptical and has no intention of being driven away by the utterances of a mad woman.  Instead, he stays, and allows himself to be driven ever closer to his inescapable doom...

A truly chilling excursion into the paranormal and nightmare world of the subconscious, Don’t Look Now is unquestionably one of the most distinctive and unsettling of British horror films.   Director Nicolas Roeg’s penchant for the elliptical narrative and boldly impressionistic editing are best utilised in this, his greatest film, to provide a cinematic experience that is genuinely disturbing and pretty well unique.  This is one of cinema’s most successful attempts to embrace the subjective, telling a story not as it is seen by a causal bystander, but as it is experienced by its central protagonist.   The maelstrom of images that constitute the fractured narrative is bewildering until we realise that what we are seeing is the confusion in a man’s mind as his life ebbs away.  Whilst most horror films are content to show us what happens on the outside (cheap visceral thrills involving silly teenagers, butcher’s knives and gallons of theatrical blood), this one shows us what takes place on the inside, what it is like to die.

At a time when British cinema had already begun its slow decline towards near-extinction, Nicolas Roeg was a beacon of hope, consistently making films that would enthuse the critics and assure the sceptics that the art of cinema had not yet been entirely surrendered to the French and the Americans.  Having started out as a camera operator in the 1950s, Roeg became a sought-after cinematographer, working on such films as Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966).  His directorial debut with Performance (1970) was well-received and he went on to make several notable films, including the David Bowie sci-fi classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).  Don’t Look Now is his most highly regarded film, a murky psychological thriller that is perfectly suited to Roeg’s technique, particularly his jarring use of image and sound to create a sense of disorientation and mental disintegration.

With Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie each turning in a top notch performance, Roeg effortlessly delivers a film that is both stylistically brilliant and a compelling piece of drama.  The film was innovative not only in dispensing with the classical linear narrative but also broke new ground with its explicit sex scene.  This scene was added by Roeg at the last minute because he was concerned that Sutherland and Christie’s characters seemed to spend most of their time bickering and did not make a sympathetic married couple.

Don’t Look Now was one of a number of films in the early 1970s that radically redefined and reinvigorated the horror genre, laying the foundation for the modern horror film, far removed from the stylised Gothic chillers of previous decades.  In common with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), it succeeds in convincing us of the reality of demonic and paranormal forces, frightening us with what we all know to be true but dare not admit, namely that there is much more to our world than we can ever hope to experience with our five senses.  But whereas The Exorcist embraces this shadow world of the unknown for all it is worth, Don’t Look Now offers us a mere glimpse, but the effect is just as terrifying, perhaps more so.

What are we to make of the distorted view of our world that Don’t Look Now presents us with?  It is as if reality as we know it is being put through a cosmic cheese grater.  Past, present and future realities seem to be splintered and forced to coalesce into a new geometry, one with a fractal texture where strands of time have become twisted and spliced, in a sublime mockery of the notion of cause and effect.  And how appropriate is Venice as a setting for this Möbius-strip-like reality.  With its dank labyrinthine passages and its quasi-surreal decor comprising grey stone and even greyer water, the ancient city is a fitting visual metaphor for the human mind, dark and unfathomable.  Yet Venice also has a sense of timelessness, an innate otherworldly quality that has inspired philosophers and artists for centuries.  This is a true no man’s land, where life and death co-exist in a perpetual limbo.  No one dies in Venice.   How can you die in a place where the clocks have long ceased to run?

© James Travers 2010

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