Don't Look Now (1973) is the Nicolas Roeg film that turns bereavement into clairvoyance and makes Venice feel like the most dangerous city on earth. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier's 1971 short story, it stars Donald Sutherland as John Baxter and Julie Christie as Laura Baxter, a couple who travel to Venice after the drowning death of their young daughter, Christine. What follows is not a ghost story in any conventional sense. It's something stranger: a film about the human mind's desperate attempt to see patterns in catastrophe, and the cost of getting those patterns wrong.
A city of water and wrong turns
Roeg chose Venice for a reason that goes beyond atmosphere. The city is a labyrinth. Every alley doubles back. Every canal looks like the one before it. It's a place designed to disorient, and Roeg uses that disorientation as a structural principle. John Baxter wanders through Venice's narrow calli convinced he keeps seeing a small figure in a red coat, the same coat his drowned daughter wore. The audience sees what he sees and shares his confusion. Is that a child? Is it her? Roeg never lets you settle.
The film's editing, which Roeg co-designed with editor Graeme Clifford, remains one of cinema's great formal achievements. Roeg cuts between past, present, and near-future in ways that feel wrong the first time and inevitable on a second viewing. A scene playing out in real time will suddenly splice in a fragment from something that hasn't happened yet. The effect is less time travel than it is memory: the way grief scrambles temporal order, the way a parent's mind keeps returning to the last moments before disaster. It's the same technique Roeg applied in Performance and Walkabout, but here it acquires a genuine horror logic that those films don't quite reach.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie at their peak
The film's centrepiece is a sex scene that was, at the time of release, considered scandalous and has since been exhaustively analysed. Roeg intercuts it with footage of John and Laura dressing afterwards, creating a loop of intimacy and aftermath that feels like both a moment of reconnection and a farewell. The power of the scene isn't erotic. It's mournful. Two people using each other's bodies to feel something other than loss. Sutherland and Christie are extraordinary here, and in almost every frame.
Christie plays Laura as a woman who has found an unexpected comfort in the word of two blind sisters, one of whom claims to see Christine's spirit beside her parents, happy and at peace. John dismisses all of this. He is a restorer of churches, a man who deals in the preservation of concrete, physical things. He doesn't believe in visions. The tragedy is that he is the one who keeps having them. Sutherland builds John's scepticism as a kind of armour, and you watch it fail piece by piece.
The mechanics of dread
What separates Don't Look Now from other grief-inflected horror films is its commitment to making dread feel earned rather than manufactured. Roeg doesn't use jump scares. He uses compression. The city shrinks. The light fades. A serial killer is loose in Venice, and the police are passive in the way authority is always passive in horror films, just plausible enough not to seem like a plot device. John receives a warning that he is in danger and ignores it. The audience, ahead of him by instinct if not by fact, watches him walk in the wrong direction through streets that all look the same.
The score, composed by Pino Donaggio, operates as a kind of emotional double agent. It sounds mournful when it should be tense, and quiet when it should swell. Donaggio's strings pull the film toward elegy even when the narrative is moving toward violence. The effect is a film that never feels like a thriller, even as it accumulates every thriller's structural elements: a killer, a city, a man who won't listen to warnings. Films with a similar atmosphere of psychological dissolution, like Repulsion (1965), place the horror inside a mind that has caved in. Roeg externalises that collapse onto an entire city.
The ending: one of cinema's great gut punches
The final sequence of Don't Look Now is one of those moments where a film earns the right to be called great. It recontextualises everything that came before it, snaps the film's loose threads into a single, brutal image, and leaves you in silence. To describe it in detail would be to take something away from a first-time viewer. To say only that the red coat returns, and what is inside it, and what happens in the next forty seconds, is enough.
Roeg's control in these closing moments is absolute. He cuts to fragments of earlier scenes, happy scenes, and the effect is devastating. The film reveals itself not as a ghost story or a thriller or a grief drama but as a tragedy about a man who had the gift of foresight and spent the film rationalising it away. The warning was always there. He simply refused to look.
Why it still matters
Released the same year as The Wicker Man (1973), Don't Look Now shares that film's preoccupation with faith, ritual, and the cost of not believing the right things at the right time. Both films set their horror in places saturated with history. Both films end with an image that makes the preceding 90 minutes collapse into a single terrible shape. They represent a specific moment in British genre cinema when filmmakers trusted audiences to be disturbed by ideas as much as by imagery.
Five decades on, Don't Look Now has not dated. Venice still looks like that. Grief still works like that. And Roeg's editing still feels like a formal argument about the relationship between memory and death that no one has successfully countered. It's the rare horror film you'd call essential not despite the fact that it offers no comfort, but because of it.