Based on the Daphne du Maurier tale of the same name, Don’t Look Now pulls a disarmingly dreamy, haunting psychological thriller from a pulpy title. When a married couple, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), lose their daughter in a lakeside drowning, they decamp from the British countryside to Venice, where John has been hired to restore an old church. Alas, a pair of weird old sisters pounce on Laura, with blind psychic Heather (the supremely creepy Hilary Mason) claiming to bear messages from their daughter and tidings of imminent danger. Meanwhile, John sees a tiny figure flitting in and out of the mysterious passageways, wearing a red coat reminiscent of that borne by his daughter to her watery grave. Poor John, some might think: an upstanding, all-American dad, he finds himself tasked with steering a gaggle of British women- and worse, European men- out of their collective irrationality. The architect is an intensely practical fellow, the only one of the tourists who can speak Italian, and an expert on the church mosaics which he longs to restore despite the ineptitude of the Italian labourers. Surely he occupies the heroic stance in a tale which fumbles dreamily down alleyways to its grim yet foreseeable climax? Arguably, it’s this very insistence on rationality that makes John the villain of the piece- or at least the buffoon of it.

From the opening scene, a blob of red paint enveloping a photograph of a church establishes the film’s sense of the uncanny, in a Venice bereft of romance. Director Nicolas Roeg filmed in the city out of the tourist season to create a bleak, barren atmosphere, shunning visitor hotspots like St Mark’s Square in favour of backstreets, alleyways, and a musty penzione. In du Maurier’s story the crowds of tourists and the busy restaurants and squares are both suffocating and reassuringly familiar, but when the sun goes down the darkness casts the city in a different role. Developing this weird, off-kilter theme, the director throws in almost campy zoom shots, whooshing in to examine furniture or passing characters with a giddy rush reminiscent of advertising. To engage with the story, the viewer must accept these distortions, learning to distrust their sense of reality in this alternative ‘Venice’; not discounting it, but noting the eerie, disjointed aural and visual crumbs flung at them as figments which could come together later.

The women understand this well- particularly John’s wife Laura, who exhibits a prizewinning balance of scepticism and adaptability that makes her a more reliable witness by far than her nitpicking husband. John offers the primary viewpoint on a hallucinatory narrative that foregrounds the distorting effects of grief; yet he is the only character to reject the possibility of such distortion, with an aggressive, stubborn blindness that speaks to his own emotional issues. The sudden death of a child cannot be rationalised. Despite the surface chill of a spiritually inclined wife, and the cackling, glassy-eyed old crones, who eventually convene in a coven-like procession at the crux of the film, John is the truly terrifying character in this arc: he is mad, yet utterly unaware, convinced of his own sanity. The ‘hero’ who seems tormented by insane or evil- in a word, unnatural- forces embodies those forces himself, as emphasised by Roeg’s changes to the Du Maurier story. In the original, the daughter’s death from meningitis leads the couple to Venice on holiday; in the film, John’s negligence leads to the daughter’s drowning, after which he decides to go straight back to work in Venice. The most watery city on the planet. Insane.

Roeg’s ‘Venice’ is really a realm of hindsight: the psychological hinterland where external processes commingle with one’s own self-perception and deception to form some kind of narrative. In our view, from John’s grief-stricken mind, his guilt and failure to comprehend his daughter’s death as an emotional rather than a logical process blind him in this realm of mosaics and mirrors. The city is a hellscape of decaying churches and bodies dragged from canals. For the macabre, blind psychic Heather, the watery, claustrophobic streets provide an echo chamber that she can navigate by sound, like a bat; necessary in a labyrinthine necropolis, where a wrong step can render visitors lost to water or its mazelike streets. Laura learns to adapt, in a way that subtly hints to the viewer that she is the more reliable, relatable actor: initially shocked and horrified by Heather’s approach, she and the viewer witness together the inexplicable truth of the woman’s vision. Childlike himself, on the other hand, John denies any possibility of his own weakness, rejecting warnings from both the Godly and the occult wings of the emotional (in the form of a priest and the clairvoyant sister respectively).

John’s failure to heed the sisters’ warning leads to his untimely death at the hands of a dwarf murderess, whose seemingly innocent figure John mistook for a child in danger. The story has all the ingredients of a classic du Maurier tale: the ideal combination of place and narrative, with the Gothic city harbouring a dangerous killer; a flawed male character who cannot see what is going on around him; and a complex exploration of the relationship between past, present, and future. Roeg also turns John into a church restorer, expanding the Christian imagery to epic proportions, and allowing him to place his protagonist up close and personal with gargoyles and icons, cut disturbingly with the blind eyes of the psychic and her cackling sibling. Part of that sense of a lurking danger is established at the beginning of the film by the red triangular shape that appears in the photographic slides of the church that John is restoring; the colour red is neatly controlled by Roeg as the central motif in a collage of flashes of fear that speckle John’s traumatised mind as he tries to identify an unseen threat. Few viewers can forget Donald Sutherland’s howl as he pulls his daughter out of the pond and collapses into the mud, holding her lifeless body in the garish red raincoat. The red triangular shape in John’s photographic slide, the red streak that suddenly smears into a curve, the shape of Christine’s limp body in John’s arms, ultimately coalesce in the unlikely figure of pixie-hooded dwarf who draws John to his untimely- yet ironically predictable- demise.

Don't Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973) — Review