Don't Look Now

Don't Look Now(1973) has been badly negleted by many film viewers does to its enematic nature. The first five to fifteen minutes are splendidly edited. Don't Look Now(1973) is based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. Borrows somes themes from the Alfred Hitchcock film of another ghost story by the author called Rebecca(1940). The film score by Pino Donaggio beats anything he has done for Brian De Palma except for Carrie(1976). Don't Look Now(1973) may have been influenced by a similar themed pic called Who Saw Her Die?(1971).

Nicolas Roeg does an excellent job in filming scenes of creepy and eerie impact. Donald Sutherland gives a extraordinary performance as the clairvoyant but disbeliever, John Baxter. The film's most controversial sequence is the shocking sex scene with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. What's shocking about this one scene is the realistic feel of the act. There are some who believe to this day that the sex scene was not acted but real. The Sutherland-Christie sex scene is done with the same editing technique as The Man Who Fell to Earth(1976).

Don't Look Now(1973) was The Sixth Sense(1999) of its era. One film that sports the same idea about fate is David Croenberg's The Dead Zone(1983). Julie Christie is just brilliant as Laura Baxter. Shares the same gloomy landscape as the director's later film, The Man Who Fell to Earth(1976). The climax of Don't Look Now(1973) was a gloomy and shocking sequence to watch. Don't Look Now(1973) is in the tradition of films such as Last Year at Marienbad(1960).

There are two types of horror films, really. There are popcorn horror films, good for a cheap in-the-moment thrill at best, and there are serious horror films, movies that linger in the mind and in the bones. I have just watched Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' and my spine is frozen. It's 4am, I'm alone, and I have a heightened awareness of sounds and sights I usually don't notice.

Here is a movie that's both resolved and unresolved, ultimately growing more ambiguous as it progresses and becomes more complex. After it is over and has become a complete(d) work to the eye of the viewer, the lasting impression is that of mystery. Too many films in this genre bark up the wrong tree, working to explain all of the events that unfold. By explaining nothing, by being almost abstract, questions and images will haunt the viewer indefinitely. It is what it is, and while this movie can be watched over and over, and the events that occur can be anticipated, they will forever remain an enigma. This is true cinema, purely visual and aural, without the helpful but ultimately self-defeating aid of a proxy observer; the viewer is the direct observer, and there's no filter through which the events and images develop any sort of tidy rationality.

Donald Sutherland's performance here is sober, adult, the grief of his character palpable. And in the face of this grief is a force that runs through the movie like a dark current, evoking the eternal and spookily ethereal and subterranean; less an eternity of the heavens than the eternity of a crypt. Venice is not merely the ideal location for this story, but the necessary location; it could not take place anywhere else. The unquestionable, and indeed imposing, Gothic majesty of the churches, whose interior height dwarfs their human occupants with the spiritual dread of the ancient, overlooks the canals of Venice like the wicked-faced stone gargoyles Sutherland finds himself physically embracing, while the canals that run through the city are literally the ghost of this couple's personal tragedy. Living in Venice, in light of the details surrounding their loss, seems almost a perverse choice, perhaps a masochistic one; they could be punishing themselves for their daughter's drowning by living in a flooded city.

It's not that Sutherland's character is a rational man in an irrational environment, but rather a rational man in an environment whose own secret code, which one may trust makes perfect sense to itself (like a tree in the forest that will only fall if no one is around to hear), is inaccessible and inexplicable to him, baring itself only in fragments in a way he chooses to ignore, just as you might ignore a spectral voice in the dead of night, dismissing it as a product of your imagination.

The movie's notorious love scene is jarringly explicit, yet rather than erotic, it is profoundly sad, and takes on a deeper (even creepy) resonance after the film ends. That the scene is intercut with scenes of Sutherland and Julie Christie dressing prevents the two from ever being completely naked and united; this editing choice changes the dimensions of the love scene in a way that I've never seen attempted elsewhere. At other points, Roeg inserts moments and images that carry sinister implications, none of which are ever concretely substantiated and only leave the viewer with more questions.

The film drifts along at a wandering pace. The final twenty minutes are among the most atmospheric and suspenseful twenty minutes in any film, culminating in a montage that is absolutely chilling.

'The Blair Witch Project,' made over two decades later and probably influenced by this, has similar aspirations, but finally has only a fraction of the emotional gravity.

Don't Look Now is based on a Daphne Du Maurier story. She also wrote Rebecca. The movie version was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and won the Best Picture Oscar.

Don't Look Now is often held as an example of how a movie adaptation can be refreshingly different from the source material.

Director Nicolas Roeg was not a traditional director preferring to push the envelope. The movie is known making Venice look Gothic and menacing. As well as the tender lovemaking scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. It was regarded as rather graphic for the time.

Laura Baxter (Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) are devastated when their daughter Christine accidentally drowns in a pond outside their home. She was wearing a shiny plastic red raincoat at the time.

John had some kind of second sight that she was in danger but was too late to save her.

Some time later, with their other son in Boarding school. Laura and John are in Venice. He is involved in a project to restore a church.

Laura has a chance encounter with two sisters, Heather and Wendy. Heather is blind but has psychic abilities. One of them is that Christine is communicating with her and that John might be in danger is they stay in Venice.

John dismisses the sisters but this is a Venice where a serial killer is on the loose. John is also having visions of someone in a red cape.

What begins as a film about family loss and grieving. It slowly but suddenly morphs into a psychic supernatural thriller that leans into horror.

You sense that John might be going mad as he has visions of Laura when he knows she has left Venice for England. He also dismisses his own supernatural abilities, his own sense that bad luck seems to follow him.

There is a subplot that Roeg introduces where John along with others could be the suspected killer. The ending is creepy and both horrific.

Apparently Du Maurier liked the adaptation of this story. Roeg introduces a lot of symbolism in the film. Hence why when the figure in the red cape turns around it is startling.

As a footnote when Joel Schumacher made Flatliners. The Kiefer Sutherland character had visions of a figure in red.

"Don't Look Now" was released at about the time of "The Excorcist". There is otherwise no basis for comparison between these movies. While the Excorcist hits us in the face with the equivalent of a special effects rubber chicken, "Don't Look Now" manages to get under your skin from the very first scene, and gradually, elegantly insinuates itself into a place where your childhood and adult fears dwell and steep. Its setting in Venice is both beautiful and menacing. Something terrible is always just around the corner from our conscious mind. It is also troubling, and, as only a good movie can, leaves more questions unanswered than resolved. Without a doubt, it contains one of the most beautiful loves scenes ever filmed, showing scenes of Christie and Sutherland in genuinely erotic (by '70's standards) lovemaking, mixed with scenes of the couple as they dress and prepare for their day, the following morning. Director Nicolas Roeg is a forgotten Master.

VENICE, ITALY has never been more appealing. After watching this I want to get up and go there right now. The movie is about a couple who lost their child in England, and are now in Venice while the husband is restoring an ancient church. Filmed entirely on location during the winter, and NOT in the schmoozy tourist areas, there is a psychic to tells the wife she can see their daughter and she is happy, which starts leading the film in one direction. Then the father starts seeing out of the corner of his eye a little girl wearing a red rain slicker, just like the one his daughter was wearing when she drowned, which goes in another direction, all the while in the background there are whisperings of a serial killer on the loose. How do any of these things have anything to do with each other? I wont say, but it's a classy thriller with a "6'Th sense" level shocker of an ending i DID NOT SEE COMING! but again, more than anything, Venice is the stare here. Over cast and wet. You can see everyone's breath. it's just a couple degreees away from snow. the walls are cracked and crumpling and the fog is real, not from a studio machine. There is an aura of mystery and romance that is indescribable in every scene. No discovery chanell or travel chanell special can sell you on this city better than this film