Nicolas Roeg was a cinematographer before he was a director. You can tell. Honestly, you can feel it in every frame of the Don't Look Now film, a 1973 masterpiece that basically rewrote the rules of how we process grief and horror on screen. It isn't just a scary movie about a creepy kid in a red coat. It’s a jagged, fractured, and deeply uncomfortable look at how trauma literally changes the way we see the world.
Have you ever looked at an old photo and felt a physical jolt because of a detail you missed the first time? That’s this movie.
The plot seems simple enough on paper. John and Laura Baxter, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, lose their daughter in a tragic drowning accident. To escape the suffocating weight of their home in England, they head to Venice. John is restoring an old church. Laura is just trying to breathe again. But Venice in the off-season isn't a postcard. It’s a labyrinth of damp stone, decaying buildings, and whispers. They meet two sisters—one of whom claims to be psychic—and things get weird. Fast.
The Don't Look Now film and the Architecture of Grief
Most horror movies rely on a monster jumping out of a closet. Roeg didn't care about that. He wanted to show how John Baxter’s refusal to accept the "irrational" led to his undoing. Venice becomes a character itself. It's a maze. The city is literally sinking, much like John’s mental state as he tries to apply logic to a series of events that defy it.
The editing is what usually trips people up. It’s non-linear. It’s frantic. Roeg uses "match cuts"—where a sound or a shape in one scene connects to the next—to show that time isn't a straight line for people who are hurting. When we see the famous, and at the time quite controversial, love scene between Sutherland and Christie, it’s intercut with them getting dressed to go out to dinner afterward.
Why do that?
Because it strips away the Hollywood glamour. It shows the mundane reality of a marriage trying to survive a catastrophe. They are together, then they are separate. They are passionate, then they are just two people putting on shoes. It’s human. It's awkward. It's real.
That Red Coat and the Visual Language of Death
Color is everything here. If you watch the Don't Look Now film closely, you’ll notice that red is almost entirely absent from the palette of the movie, except when it’s signaling danger or the memory of their daughter, Christine. She was wearing a bright red Mackintosh when she died.
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Whenever a flash of red appears in the grey, soggy streets of Venice, John chases it. He thinks he’s seeing his daughter’s ghost. Or maybe he’s just seeing his own guilt manifested in the peripheral vision of a cold alleyway. It’s a brilliant use of visual shorthand.
I spoke with a film historian once who pointed out that the movie uses "fragmented montage" to mimic the way the brain handles PTSD. You don't remember a car crash in a smooth, cinematic sequence. You remember the smell of burning rubber, the sound of glass breaking, and the color of the other car's bumper. Roeg captures that shattered perspective perfectly.
The Infamous Ending That Everyone Remembers (But Often Misunderstands)
We have to talk about the ending. If you haven't seen it, maybe skip this part, though the movie is over fifty years old at this point.
John spends the whole film being the "rational" man. He’s an architect. He deals in stone, mortar, and blueprints. When the blind psychic tells him his daughter is laughing and sitting between him and his wife at the table, he scoffs. He gets angry. He thinks it’s a scam.
But then he sees the figure in the red coat scurrying through the Venetian shadows.
He corners the figure. He thinks he’s found a miracle. He thinks he’s found his daughter. He reaches out, and... it’s a person with dwarfism, a serial killer who has been terrorizing the city. She pulls out a cleaver and cuts his throat.
It’s brutal. It’s shocking. But more importantly, it’s a payoff for the "second sight" John refused to acknowledge he had. The opening of the film shows John looking at a slide of a church and seeing a red blotch bleed across the image. He had the vision. He saw his own death. He just didn't know how to read the map.
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Why Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie Mattered
The chemistry between the leads is the glue. Rumors swirled for years that the sex scene was unsimulated. Both actors have denied it repeatedly, but the fact that people believed it speaks to the raw, unpolished energy they brought to the roles.
Sutherland plays John as a man who is trying to hold a crumbling wall together with his bare hands. Christie plays Laura as someone who finds a weird, desperate comfort in the supernatural because the "real world" has become too painful to inhabit.
Their performances make the Don't Look Now film more than just a thriller. It’s a character study of two people who are grieving in completely opposite directions. She looks toward the spirit world to find peace; he looks toward his work and physical reality to find stability. They are moving away from each other even when they are in the same room.
Technical Mastery and the Roeg Style
Critics at the time, like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, recognized that the film was doing something different with the medium. It wasn't just following the footsteps of Hitchcock. It was more experimental.
- Sound Design: The sound of water is constant. It’s dripping, splashing, flowing. It’s a reminder of the pond where the daughter died.
- Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond used natural light to make Venice look ancient and tired, not romantic.
- The Score: Pino Donaggio’s music shifts between hauntingly beautiful piano melodies and discordant strings that make your skin crawl.
Interestingly, Donaggio had never scored a film before this. Roeg hired him because he wanted someone who understood the "soul" of Venice. Donaggio was a local. He captured the city’s melancholic, damp atmosphere in a way a Hollywood composer probably couldn't have.
Common Misconceptions About the Movie
A lot of people go into this expecting a slasher flick. They hear "serial killer in Venice" and think it’s going to be a body count movie. It’s not.
Actually, the serial killer is barely in it. The murders are a background noise to the internal collapse of the Baxter family. If you go in looking for Friday the 13th, you’re going to be bored. But if you go in looking for a psychological puzzle, you’ll be obsessed.
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Another misconception is that the film is "anti-religion" because of the way the clergy are portrayed. John is restoring a church, yet he finds no solace in it. The priests are often depicted as distant or even slightly sinister. But really, it’s more about the failure of all institutions—science, religion, and logic—to explain the mystery of death.
Practical Insights for the Modern Viewer
If you are going to watch the Don't Look Now film for the first time, or even the tenth, there are a few ways to get the most out of the experience.
First, watch the water. Water is the catalyst for everything. It's where life is lost, and it's the medium through which the "visions" often occur. Pay attention to how reflections are used in windows and puddles. Roeg uses reflections to show that we are seeing "through a glass darkly."
Second, notice the recurring motifs. Not just the color red, but the breaking of glass. In the beginning, a glass breaks just as the daughter dies. Throughout the film, glass continues to shatter at pivotal moments. It's a signal that the barrier between the past and the present is thin.
Third, don't try to "solve" it too early. The movie isn't a whodunnit. It's a "what is happening to my mind" it. Let the disjointed editing wash over you. If you feel confused, you're exactly where Roeg wants you to be.
How to Experience the Film Today
If you want the best version, look for the Criterion Collection 4K restoration. The colors are much closer to what Roeg and Richmond intended. The deep reds pop against the muted greys of the Venice canals, and the sound mix is crisp enough to hear the subtle, eerie whispers in the background.
- Watch for the motifs: Track the appearances of the red Mackintosh.
- Analyze the editing: Notice how a shot of a bridge in Venice might cut directly to a memory of a pond in England.
- Research the source material: The film is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. Reading the original text provides a fascinating look at how Roeg expanded on the "psychic" elements.
- Check out the legacy: See how it influenced modern directors like Ari Aster (Hereditary) or Edgar Wright. The "shattered memory" style of editing is now a staple of high-end psychological horror.
The Don't Look Now film remains a haunting reminder that we don't always see what's right in front of us. Sometimes, we only see what we want to see, until it’s far too late to look away. It’s a lesson in the dangers of ignoring our intuition and a masterpiece of 1970s cinema that hasn't aged a day.
To truly appreciate it, watch it in a dark room with no distractions. Let the labyrinth of Venice pull you in. Just don't expect a happy ending.