Don’t Look Now (1973)

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Don’t Look Now is Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 British-Italian psychological horror film adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 short story, depicting a married couple who travel to Venice after their daughter’s drowning death and encounter elderly sisters who claim psychic contact with the deceased child.

Donald Sutherland plays John Baxter. Julie Christie plays Laura Baxter. Hilary Mason plays Heather. Clelia Matania plays Wendy. Massimo Serato plays the Bishop. Allan Scott and Chris Bryant wrote the screenplay. Casey Productions and Eldorado Films produced the film.

The film has built a significant reputation in later decades, with critics regarding it among the greatest British horror productions. This film frightens me more than most horror pictures with an actual monster in them. It’s a story about grief with ghosts in it, or maybe without them, and Roeg never lets me settle on which. My one complaint is the deliberate middle stretch, which asks for more patience than some viewers will want to give.

Nicolas Roeg’s film reads as one that showed how horror could build through associative editing and atmospheric construction instead of conventional supernatural mechanics. The film shows that the genre can work through grief structure that converts psychological content into supernatural tone.

Baxter lands as a character whose psychic ability and refusal to acknowledge it drives the film’s tragic arc. Nicolas Roeg’s direction shows formal complexity that allows the material to work through accumulating dread.

The production left a template that later psychological horror productions extended, and its influence on later cinema editing techniques has been documented extensively.

The Editing Approach

Associative editing, which the late 1960s and early 1970s cinema developed through Roeg’s approach, carries the film. The approach relies on cross-cutting between time periods and locations that the underlying material’s psychic content invites. The result is the film’s formal signature, which later films have borrowed.

The famous love scene cross-cuts between the couple in bed and the two of them dressing afterward.

I think it’s the most tender scene I know in any horror film. Cutting between the two makes the intimacy feel lived-in and already slipping into the past, and it shows how editing can carry closeness without conventional duration. Later films including Out of Sight (1998) picked up the template, and I don’t blame them.

The Atmospheric Approach

Venice’s winter setting, which reads as decaying and dangerous instead of tourist romantic, builds the film’s atmospheric construction. The approach builds through location work that later films including The Comfort of Strangers (1990) extended. This generates the picture’s distinctive sensory tone.

The red elements, the daughter’s coat and the small figure the film keeps tracking, are motifs the story builds into its structure, and the red coat is the image from this film I can’t shake. Roeg uses production design to carry the grief, so the daughter never quite leaves the screen, and I found that more unsettling than any shock the genre usually offers.

The Performance Approach

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie give performances that ground the supernatural content in grief. The treatment works through naturalistic engagement that conventional horror’s heightened approach wouldn’t provide. It builds emotional foundation that the horror content’s effectiveness requires.

The relationship between John and Laura works as the production’s emotional center that the supernatural content frames. This method allows the horror to play as consequence of grief instead of external imposition. The result makes clear how horror performance can integrate emotional and supernatural tones.

Sutherland and Christie are the reason the horror works for me. They play the grief so quietly, like two people who’ve run out of things to say to each other, that by the time the supernatural arrives I’m already frightened for them.

Does Don’t Look Now still hold up?

It’s a 9, and it comes close to a 10 for me.

Watch it for the love scene, for that red coat moving through a wintry, rotting Venice, and for Sutherland and Christie playing a marriage cracked by loss. The deliberate pacing is the only thing that keeps it off the top score. Everything else about the way Roeg builds dread out of grief is the kind of horror filmmaking I wish more directors had the nerve to try.

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