Don’t Look Now is a frightening, deeply felt film about bereavement, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making its marriage convincing. Roeg’s fractured storytelling occasionally labours the warnings, but the fear comes from people worth caring about.
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is a frightening film that takes a grieving marriage seriously enough to make the fear hurt. John and Laura Baxter, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, go to Venice after their young daughter drowns. The possibility of contact with her unsettles a couple who are already struggling with her loss. Roeg gives their sorrow time and attention, so the supernatural matters before there is much to explain.
We were shaken by the opening drowning, where the cutting makes a family tragedy feel horribly difficult to take in. Editor Graeme Clifford keeps returning us to that unsettled way of watching: a fragment catches the eye before its place in the story becomes clear. The shifts in time require attention, but they also suggest how little control these people have over what enters their thoughts. Roeg does not let a remembered image stay safely in the past. The editing keeps it close to what is happening now.
Anthony B. Richmond photographs Venice in muted colours, with red standing out sharply enough to pull attention away from everything around it. That selective use of colour makes us search the picture, often before there is a clear reason to be alarmed. The dampness and the water matter just as much: after the opening, even the surroundings offer little comfort. Venice remains recognisably a real city, with the cold and the difficulty of finding a way through it left in.
Sutherland and Christie give the film the everyday familiarity it needs. They are believable as people who have shared a life before the story begins, and who can still be close without being equally ready to face what has happened. Sutherland makes John’s resistance to the supernatural understandable; accepting it would mean accepting possibilities he cannot manage. Christie gives Laura’s longing for contact with their child enough urgency to keep it from becoming merely a plot device. The elliptical love scene allows them tenderness without pretending that sex has repaired anything.
Pino Donaggio’s music gives the sadness a clear, direct expression. That is useful when Clifford’s cutting has us occupied with how one moment connects to another: the score keeps the parents’ hurt from getting lost in the business of following clues. The sound contributes to the unease without making the couple seem remote. There is room here for tenderness, even when the images are making it difficult to relax.
The weakness comes when the premonitions begin to feel too insistently arranged. Allan Scott and Chris Bryant’s screenplay sometimes pushes John towards disbelief so firmly that a recognisable man risks becoming the person a supernatural thriller needs to ignore its warnings. Those stretches can feel chilly, and the film occasionally makes us wait for connections we have already begun to suspect. It is a small but real limitation in a film otherwise so attentive to the untidiness of grief.
The supernatural thriller often keeps us waiting for an explanation, and Roeg knows how to exploit that habit. He also makes the waiting uncomfortable in a different way: spending time with these parents means facing a loss that no explanation will make bearable. Treating the film solely as a puzzle would miss what Sutherland and Christie are doing. Give it your full attention, and preferably some company afterwards.
