Based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story, Don’t Look Now opens with the death of a child, but the tragedy is that of her parents, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie). Relocating from the English countryside to wintry Venice, where John is restoring artwork in a church, the couple try in their different ways to recover from the loss. There is tension between them, as she falls in with two peculiar sisters – one a blind clairvoyant – and he catches glimpses of a figure who resembles his dead daughter.
Director Nicolas Roeg composes an uncanny masterpiece of colour (notably red) and fractured editing, expressing the characters’ psychology and experience to stunning effect. The sex and death scenes have seldom been matched.
