Customer Reviews

Don't Look Now

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

DON'T LOOK NOW is a film for people with a particular taste, and the unwary viewer will either be pleasantly or unpleasantly shocked. From a seemingly simple premise -- a couple trying to overcome their daughter's death, and the odd psychic they meet while staying in Venice -- director Nicholas Roeg creates a thriller/horror movie/dazzling puzzles that slowly infects your mind and then shocks you with its bizarre twists.

Be warned: this isn't a movie for everyone. It relies on visual puzzles and clues and an incredible lot of misdirection for its effect. This might bore some people; it had me riveted with the first scene and held me up through the mind-bending conclusion. Like THE SIXTH SENSE, SLEUTH, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and THE OTHERS, the film is playing a massive deception on the audience and the characters, engaing in a strange game that pays off in an incredibly satisfying (if devastating) way. Every time you think you know what kind of story you're watching, the movie starts veering in another direction, and only the finale finally makes the purpose of the plot clear.

Director Roeg, a former cinematographer, crafts an eerie vision of Venice as damp, mouldy, and crumbling, and his visual compositions have a startling quality that adds to the bizarre and alienated moodof the film. Although few movies have directly copied the story of DON'T LOOK NOW, its directorial style has become the standard for such filmmakers as David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan, and David Fincher.

This is a landmark piece of work and worth viewing if you enjoy films full of mystery and intelligence (for example, the movies I listed above) and unusual visual style.

One of the creepiest films ever made. This one stays with you, and all of the participants are crucial to the film's effect, so it's not just the artful photography and editing. The beautiful Julie Christie, always a bit mysterious, has an amazing sex scene with Donald Sutherland (they play a husband and wife in this film), that is intercut with shots of the two getting dressed afterward. Erotica, not pornography, although it treads a thin line. Inspired from start to finish, Sutherland's slow motion fall from a scaffold is foreshadowed earlier by Christie's slow motion blackout at a restaurant table. There are many moments of cinemagraphic brilliance throughout, and Roeg's triumph here is how he manages to take a rather simple story and make it seem more complex and deep than it really is. Because the film is so visually stimulating, the shocking ending is not critical to its success; in other words, knowing what's going to happen doesn't matter, as it would if the rest of the movie weren't so stunning. This isn't just one of the best horror pictures ever, it's a very good movie, above categorization.

This film, which features Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at their most young and gorgeous, may be one of the scariest movies ever made.

Based on a Daphne DuMaurier story, it concerns two grieving parents (Christie and Sutherland) who have lost their young daughter in a horrible drowning accident right on their opulent English estate. Mourning beyond reason, the shattered couple goes to Venice, where Sutherland repeatedly sees visions of his dead daughter, always just out of reach.

Through disjointed stream-of-consciousness images, gorgeous views of Venice, lush colors, eerie people with second sight, and one of the most erotic love scenes on film, we feel this couple's anguish, fear and desperate love for one another. And we know, simply by feeling it, that there is great danger lurking just out of sight. But we don't know what it is.

As the suspense builds unbearably, the viewer is mesmerized by the photography, the music, the beauty--and yes, the grief. And when the end comes...well, let's just say that you'll want to leave the lights on for many nights to come.

An absolutely brilliant film.

Don't Look Now, loosely based on a mediocre Daphne Du Maurier short story, is Nic Roeg's best film, and is packed with compelling paradoxes of time and space. This film has the simplest of plots but tampers with the `natural chronology of things', experimenting with flashbacks and indeed flashforwards. The viewer is taken from the present and plunged without warning into various sections of the story's time-scale. The audience must be constantly alerted to differentiate between dream sequences, reality, episodes from the past, events from the present and even premonitions of the future. This has a profoundly disquieting effect on us, and most of the film's power is derived from this. We are offered clues, associations, images and ambiguities, but never provided with answers. Don't Look Now is just that, an extremely entertaining puzzle.

The Baxters of Roeg's film inhabit a dark, shadowy labyrinthine world of bridges and mirrors that could only be Venice. Architect Sutherland and wife Christie are on a working holiday recovering from the recent drowning of their little girl, and this setting perfectly mirrors their internal grief and their feelings of uncertainty and guilt. The fractured time sequence gives the film a coldness, helping with the atmosphere of marital chill.

Some of my favourite moments committed to film are here: the chilling opening drowning sequence, the greatest love-making scene ever (in which the most believable coupling between actors without showing actual penetration, is inter-cut with their getting dressed for dinner) and the most deeply disturbing denouement that will ever disrupt your sleep pattern.

All this, and Roeg's vivid stylistics, the superb use of dissolves (rarely used in commercial film) to give the proceedings a nightmarish quality, wonderfully tonal mood-lighting, blood symbolism (little girl in the red rain-coat...spilt red wine on slide projectors...clothes on washing-lines reflected in canal water...)

A dark tale of madness, magic and murderous intent, the blurring of reality and illusion, of drowned children and homicidal dwarfs; brought to life by truly great film-making, editing and the best performances of their careers from Sutherland and Christie.

Roeg's rogue genius has never been bettered.

The senseless and [accidental?] death of a child. Guilt?
Dim, underlit streets and waterways of Venice. Visions of a small child wearing a hooded red raincoat....... Steamy sex.....A serial killer........A blind psychic.....warnings....and a very sharp straight razor, or two.....and lover's do learn.....

A deliciously dark and brooding concept by auteur Nicholas Roeg ["Bad Timing"]of Daphne Du Maurier's vision of grieving parents Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, recovering in Venice after the death of their only daughter. AND this movie has one of the best love-scenes ever recorded on film - excellent - not gratuitous or offensive.

VENICE, though, is the Star of this work. Forget any Summer Holiday memories you might still have of this wonderous dreamcity, she really comes to life during the winter! To say more about the plot would be to betray the work, but if you like experiences along the lines of "The Innocents", perhaps even the original "Haunting" - see this one. "Don't Look Now" is kind of the flip-side of Kate Hepburn's "Sunmmertime", even "Lover's Must Learn". It's an odd kaleidoscopic view of the city and its post midnight pulse - but be warned - stay in your hotel room - don't venture out on your own, especially after dark...........those Venetian walkways are still so dimly lit, never quite know what you might find in a doorway, or in the canals for that matter].

A companion-piece? The later "Comfort of Strangers" - equally disturbing, but a great double-bill!

Those who reject the notion of coincidence and dare to inspect a more fragile geometry of space and time will embrace this spellbinding classic which was overlooked in 1974 due to the brouhaha over "The Exorcist" and its camp shenanigans.

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) returns to watery Venice, Italy on the heels of his young daughter drowning to work on the church façade restoration of the face of Christ. The art restorationist spirals deeper into a web of ESP and quantum physics which he dismisses as "mumbo-jumbo", and refuses to confront his intuitive side... and his profound sense of guilt.

Director Roeg seduces viewers with a split-second 8 minute what-was-that-I-think-I-saw opening unlike anything ever conceived, then turns suspense and horror cliches inside out to reveal a heartbreaking portrait of a married couple wrestling with the worst grief - the death of a child.

"Don't Look Now" remains one of the most thought-provoking, troubling films ever made; Julie Christie shimmers as Sutherland's fragile wife. Massimo Serato turns in an enigmatic performace as the troubled Father Barbaraggio, who "wishes he didn't have to believe in prophecy" and whose "father also died in a fall." Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Blow Out) delivers his first film score in all of its Venetian, Vivaldi-induced splendor and melancholy; those organs rushing in at the 'denouement' chill to the bone as the sweet strings fall soon behind, and Christie's radiance in the foreground of that music remains one of cinema's greatest moments. Music lovers will also appreciate his tribute to the "Lover's Concerto" during the erotic, tender love scene much discussed on these pages.

"Don't Look Now" warns all with its title to overlook, to forgive, to get on, but the great, gothic trick is that no one who looks outside himself for meaning can take his eyes off of it.

Needless to say, viewers who think "Scream" is a horror film will be lost and/or bored. This is the thoughtful, reflective man or woman's territory, not for consumers who want to be babysat for two hours. In other words, slow-going for ADD-oids, and sublime provocation for everyone else.

On a bright autumn day a little girl drowns in a pond near her home. Her unsuspecting parents, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter(Julie Christie) are discussing idly when suddenly, and against any logic, John, overcome by a feeling that something is wrong, bursts out of the house. He finds the small body floating and drained from life; his howl of desperation signals the tragedy and absurd terror that are only just beginning to unfold.
Still grieving the loss of their daughter, the Baxters go to Venice where John is working as an architect in charge of a church restoration. They are still trying to cope and collect the pieces of their broken lives when they meet two strange sisters, Heather, who is blind and claims to be a medium, and Wendy. Laura collapses when Heather tells her that she has "seen" her dead daughter and that she is happy. When Laura comes round she is in a state of abnormal elation, convinced that the spirit of her daughter is still with her. John has none of that but much to his frustration Laura falls under the spell of the two sisters. Heather warns the Baxters that something terrible will happen to them. Her prophecy is partly fulfilled when John has a near fatal accident in the church. At the same time the Venetian police is puzzling over the identity of a murderer dispatching bodies in the canals. John and Laura have an intimate if rather brief encounter back in their hotel. But bliss and happiness will not last. Not for them, not any more. Their relation strains under the combined weights of paranoid fear, guilt, anxiety and death. The ending of the film is the missing bit of the puzzle - merciless, unforgiving, shocking. And all that is left is the desperation of a lonely tragedy.
"Don't Look Now", based on a Daphne Du Maurier story, is a multilayered masterpiece and arguably Roeg's finest film. This is one of the select few films where the form informs the content and the content is reinforcing the narrative structure and the formal vision of the director. Roeg weaves an almost experimental narrative where illusion takes over from reality. His editing makes deliberate use of subliminal images that surface meaningfully only at the end. Against any conceivable cinematic convention, Roeg shifts freely from present to past and then to future events. Flash-backs and flash-forwards succeed in conveying a sense of psychological disorientation, reflected in the labyrinthine structure of Venice. The film is superficially about premonitions and faith. But the leitmotif is the fleeting nature of love and the omnipresence of death. Death is the dark companion that walks with John and Laura in the foggy Venetian alleys. Their genuine love and understanding for each other cannot save them from the certainty that all you love will one day perish. But it is their love scene that ultimately lingers in mind; Roeg interspersed masterfully this scene with routine daily tasks (Laura taking a bath, John brushing his teeth, both dressing to go out) thus conveying the intimacy that governs the married life of John and Laura. Time and again people have noted that the love scene looks and feels authentic (without ever being gratuitous), so much so, that some are convinced that Sutherland and Christie were actually making love. Be that as it may, it is Roeg's directorial mastery that imbues the scene with flesh and blood and brings it to life: John and Laura are genuinely in love. Very rarely before or after this film has a director ventured so successfully in romanticising married life.
The poignant use of Venice as a backdrop to the drama is a masterstroke. Roeg treats the old city, as many others have observed, as an additional character. The cinematography is brilliant, Venice is shot in a Caravaggio-like chiaroscuro, winter colours bringing to the fore a dark and sinister character surely not to be witnessed by summer visitors. This is a dreamy, quasi-magical world, complete with mirrors, carnival masks, dwarfs and crumbling churches. At the end of the day, Venice is reflecting the emotional state of the Baxters. John and Laura loose themselves in Venetian alleys in the same way they loose their grip on reality. The emptiness of the city during the winter mirrors the emotional vacuum and desolation in their hearts after the loss of their daughter. The additional subplot of the murders in the city is crucial as it creates an ever tightening noose of suspicion, anxiety, fear and death.
Pino Donagio's score is spot on, evocative and haunting at the same time. Sutherland and Christie are impeccable, offering understated, sensitive and nuanced performances. Christie has an outstanding autumnal beauty and kindness, ever so slightly teetering on the edge. Sutherland, in a great male tragic role, is resigned to the facts of life, and provides a performance which is difficult to be matched (as indeed is the wig he is wearing throughout the film).
Without a shadow of a doubt this is a difficult film to watch, what with the shattering ending or the complex narrative. Yet it is crystal clear that it has the rare profundity only to be found in a handful of films. It rewards multiple viewings and I warmly recommend it.

If I'd reviewed DON'T LOOK NOW immediately after seeing it the first time, I would probably have given it about three stars. Why? Not because it's an average movie, but because it had to settle in and nag at me for a while. I kept thinking about it's many subtle hints and portents. I kept seeing different scenes in my head. Yep, I was haunted by this movie! It came to the point where I simply had to watch it again. I now consider DLN a dark and brooding masterpiece of horror and supernatural dread. Both Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are perfect in their roles as shell-shocked parents, forced to face both the realities of death and the possibility of what lies beyond it. I highly recommend this movie. If you don't love it the first go round, wait a while and see if it doesn't grow on you...

A film which manages to be both deeply moving and intensely chilling throughout. As both a gothic horror and a study of human grief, "Don't Look Now" offers up a vision of end-of-season Venice that is both sombre and sinister. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a couple visiting Venice after the accidental death of their young daughter. Both actors are truly believable, and their love scene is one of the most touching and erotic you will ever see. Sutherland is haunted by fleeting glimpses of a small, red cloaked figure amongst the alleyways and canals, and the plot itself has as many twists and turns as the city in which it is set. Fine acting, an emotionally resonant score from Pino Donaggio and inspired direction on the part of Nicholas Roeg make this an unforgettable masterpiece. It is no exaggeration to say that the penultimate scene is one of the most chilling ever made, but a second viewing reveals the poignancy behind the horror.

Nicolas Roeg proved he was a filmmaking genius in 1971 with Walkabout.
In 1973, he released Don't Look Now, a horror film, that isn't watched by many today but in my mind cements his status as a brilliant filmmaker. Don't Look Now is not a typical horror film. It works with dread, not with fright. It is a series of images that lead up to the final shocking climax, much like Rosemary's Baby. The difference between this film and that film is this movie has a lot more unsettling images leading to the climax. In fact, this movie's all about unsettling images and its opening sequence establishes that quickly. The movie's opening sequence truly ranks up there with one of the best. The movie opens, sometime in autumn, in the British countryside home of John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland & Julie Christie). Inside, they're working. John is studying slides of Venetian churches. In the slide he's studying there appears to be a figure wearing a shiny red raincoat. Outside, their children play. Their son is riding his bike, their daughter Christine, wearing a shiny plastic raincoat, plays by a pond. Christine throws her ball into the bond, her brother runs over a pane of glass, inside John looks up as if sensing the sound. He spills a glass, a red stain appears on the slide. It looks like blood. The next shot shows Christine lying face down in the pond. John gets up, runs outside, wades across the pond, and grabs his daughters' body with a cry of grief. This, of course, sets up the plot of the entire movie as well as the visual theme of the movie. In the next scene, John and Laura are in Venice while John restores an old church. Their son is at a school back in Britain. While at a restaurant, Laura meets two old women named Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania). Heather's blind and, Wendy claims, psychic. Pretty soon, Heather tells Laura that she has seen Christine laughing and that she's happy. Laura is shocked and, returning to the table where her husband is, she passes out. When she awakes at the hospital, she finds herself believing the women, and her and John go back to the house for a graphic sex scene. That's not accurate; it is graphic, but also realistic and passionate. Intercut with scene of John and Laura dressing afterward. As the plot progresses, John begins to see a figure wearing a shiny red raincoat running around Venice. John is a man who doesn't believe in omens or ghosts or the afterlife. Even though his wife is happy about what Heather has told her, and he lets her have her happiness, he sees it as a bunch of mumbo jumbo. In one scene, Heather tells Laura that it's John who has second sight. "He has the gift, even if he doesn't know it, even if he's resisting it." I've left out several key parts in the plot, because I might inadvertently give you an idea of what happens by explaining them. But the movie has a great, haunting, twist ending that I'm surprised doesn't get more attention. Sure, you realize what's going to happen a few moments before it does...But it's still very well done. Roeg and his editor took a risk by placing one key-scene in the film that could've ruined this ending. The scene is when Laura has gone back to Britain, because their son has had a minor accident. As John travels across the Grand Canal, he sees his wife and the two sisters pass him. How could this be? Is it a mistake? A fantasy? This scene is one of the most haunting scenes in the movie, but it won't click with most people until the end...And yes, it didn't click with me either. Don't Look Now is a masterpiece of horror, whether it's the kind of horror you enjoy or not. It's got great performances, directorial brilliance, and great cinematography. In other words, see it.

GRADE: A-