Don’t Look Now is a 1973 thriller / horror from British director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth).
It stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a married couple whose young daughter recently died in a tragic drowning. They take a working vacation in Venice to try to overcome their grief. Christie runs into two elderly sisters. One of them is blind and claims to be able to talk to the dead. She starts telling Christie that she’s in contact with her daughter. Sutherland doesn’t believe in the old woman and thinks that the sisters are trying to scam them somehow. Meanwhile there is a serial killer stalking the streets of Venice.
Nicolas Roeg was a cinematographer before he became a director and he has a very unique visual style. He tends to tell a non-linear story. His first film Performance is a weird, surreal, messed up story of a gangster (James Fox) who ends up slowly trading places with rock star Mick Jagger. In 1990 he adapted Roald Dahl’s children’s novel The Witches into a live action movie. It was the last movie that Jim Henson worked on and the movie is a fairly creepy film with Angelica Huston portraying the head witch as an entity of pure evil.
Don’t Look Now is a slow moving thriller but the build up and the payoff is worth the wait. The film is also notorious for a love scene between Christie and Sutherland that was fairly graphic in the 1970’s and still is today.
