Daphne Du Maurier's shattering psychic thriller has rightly taken its place as one the great British horror films. A truly original film, Don't Look Now is a superb psychological thriller, an eerie horror story, and much more. When a little girl is drowned, her parents (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) go to Venice to forget. There they meet a strange clairvoyant, who tells them their daughter is still very much alive and gives them ominous messages from the grave.
As their whole world starts to disintegrate around them, everyday objects turn into omens of doom and ordinary events become terrifying glimpses into another dimension. The father begins a frantic search for his daughter, through the deserted canals and menacing alleys of Venice in winter, into a world where nobody can be sure of what is real and what is illusion - until the macabre, shattering climax.
Review
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now once seemed radically new with its kaleidoscopic imagery, dreamlike editing, and willingness to let mystery be mysterious on several levels of reality/illusion--plus art-house darling Julie Christie in a long, nude love scene! Nowadays, this 1974 adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier ghost story looks almost classical. Following the drowning of their child in England, Laura (Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) have come to dank, eternally dying Venice, where he is supervising the restoration of a moldering church and she is either slipping into or climbing out of madness with the help of a pair of creepy spinster sisters, one of whom can "see" even though blind. John may share this psychic power, though he resists accepting it as the canals fill with murder victims, surface realities turn shimmery as water, and a red-coated figure--the daughter's ghost?--keeps flickering in the corner of our vision. Though surreal and perplexing, the film does eventually add up, and the ending remains a real throat-grabber. --Richard T. Jameson
Special Features:
Featurette - "Don't Look Now - Looking Back"
Theatrical Trailer
DVD Rom - downloadable pages from the original theatrical campaign brochure
