Don't Look Now / Nicolas Roeg (1973)
A child's death. Perhaps nothing could be more horrible. How to carry on after such a thing is something most people don't ponder. In Don't Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier imagined how the child would haunt their parents.
Don't Look Now is the kind of ghost story in which it is never made clear that the ghost is even there. Atmospheric and moody, Don't Look Now combines 70's paranoia and creeping atmosphere together into one cohesive film. The film places its characters in a bad dream, where nothing is clear after the opening scene.
We see the daughter, Christine (Sharon Williams), playing outside near a pond on the family's rural property, wearing her red raincoat. Inside the house, Donald Sutherland's John is looking at slides of a church he's restoring. On one slide he finds an anomaly (a red-hooded figure) that unsettles him, along with a glass of water spilling and spreading red ink/dye across a photograph. The editing crosscuts rapidly between John's growing unease indoors and Christine outside, building toward her falling into the pond and drowning, intercut with John's delayed reaction as he senses something is wrong before he consciously understands why. He runs outside and pulls her body from the water, but arrives too late.
That clarity of action sets up a powerful shift for the rest of the film. The drowning is the one moment of total narrative clarity Roeg allows. Every subsequent "vision" or coincidence is deliberately murky and hard to parse, but the inciting death itself is rendered with total visual certainty. The audience knows exactly what happened and exactly what the red coat means.
John and Laura (Julie Christie) leave England for Venice where John takes on a restoration project. They may hope the change of scenery will distract them from their loss, but have chosen a city immersed in water. One of many contradictions Roeg injects into the film. They're surrounded by a reminder of their loss, walking along side it in nearly every scene.
It's well earned and a twist that feels rewarding because it reveals just how consumed by grief and guilt our protagonist has been.
The irony exists entirely for the audience to notice; the characters remain oblivious to it within the story. That silence is consistent with Roeg's whole method of creating dread. He consistently avoids dialogue in favor of images and juxtapositions. The film has already shown you the drowned daughter in a red coat, and then surrounds you with canals, water reflections, and rain for two hours.
Once there, John begins having visions. He's seeing a red-hooded figure moving through Venice, always on the periphery of his vision. The tragedy of the film is that John is bad at reading signs. He has genuine precognitive visions and still can't correctly interpret them. A character sharp enough to notice "we've relocated to a giant watery echo of our daughter's death" would be a character equipped to survive what's coming. His blindness to the obvious irony is symptomatic of the same failure of perception that gets him killed. This is amplified by Roeg's depiction of Venice as labyrinthine and crumbling, and the use of reflection throughout.
Of course, John isn't sure what he's seeing. Or if he's seeing it at all. By the time he decides to pursue the red-hooded figure, our pattern-recognition works against us the same way it fails John. We assume we know what red means. We are proven wrong.
John and Laura aren't left childless after Christine's death, we learn. Their son, Johnny, is away at boarding school in England for most of the film. But the film doesn't offer him as compensation or comfort. Christine's death remains the wound that structures everything, and Johnny's distance both physically in England, and emotionally reinforces how unresolved and unspoken the grief stays between John and Laura throughout. Johnny is referenced and at one point there's a frightening moment involving him at school, prompting Laura to fly back to check on him that adds to the film's atmosphere of dread and disjointed communication between Venice and home.
Don't Look Now is about the cultural fault line between rationalism and the paranormal that ran through 1970s British and European culture. It also reflects a post-1960s move away from spectacle-driven horror toward trauma- and grief-centered horror, presaging a subgenre that wouldn't fully flourish until decades later. John is having visions but doesn't know what they mean. He seeks explanation from a seer, who is literally without sight. The presence of the blind psychic and the couple's clashing responses to her further demonstrate how lost John actually is.
John's grief is pushing him (and the viewer) in a direction that's wrong. The ending is a shock based on that realization. It's well earned and a twist that feels rewarding because it reveals just how consumed by grief and guilt our protagonist has been.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
The drowning scene is truly shocking start to the film. Its panic and Sutherland's explosive response in the water hangs over the rest of movie like the grief that follows its main characters.
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