Plot Summary

A married couple is haunted by mysterious occurrences after the death of their young daughter. Based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, whose works inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds, Don’t Look Now tells the story of Laura and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), who have recently moved to Venice so that John, an architect, can oversee the restoration of an old church. The couple hopes that the change of setting will allow them to forget the recent tragic death of their child, but instead they find themselves beset by reminders of her death everywhere they turn, as city residents try to deal with a series of unexplained murders. The drama deepens when the Baxters encounter a blind psychic and her eccentric sister, who tell them they can contact their daughter’s spirit. Laura embraces the proposal, but John is skeptical until he has his visions of his own: fleeting glimpses of someone in a red coat similar to one that belonged to his daughter.

Memorable Lines

Laura Baxter: One of your children has posed a curious question: if the world is round, why is a frozen lake flat?
John Baxter: That’s a good question.
Laura Baxter: [flipping through book] Ah, here it says that Lake Ontario curves more than 3 degrees from its Eastern end to its Western end. So frozen water really isn’t flat.
John Baxter: Nothing is what it seems.

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Laura Baxter: This one who’s blind. She’s the one that can see.

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Inspector Longhi: The skill of police artists is to make the living appear dead.

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John Baxter: Christine is dead. She is dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!

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Inspector Longhi: Age makes women grow to look more like each other. Don’t you find that? Old men decay and each becomes quite distinct. Women seem to converge, eh?

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Thoughts from the HauntedHouses.com team

Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg’s nightmarish and atmospheric 1973 classic, takes you on a winding, unpredictable trip that starts as a meditation on grief and ends as a supernatural thriller. It’s a stark, tragic melodrama that veers off into Twilight Zone territory.

The movie is based on the Daphne Du Maurier story of the same name. Du Maurier’s fiction has become a proven fertile ground for filmmakers over the years. Hitchcock used her writings as source material for two movies: Rebecca and The Birds. Other Du Maurier titles, such as My Cousin Rachel, have received multiple adaptations. Du Maurier’s best-known tales have in common a melding of character-based melodrama with the lurid, gothic, and/or supernatural, and Don’t Look Now is no exception.

The first half of Don’t Look Now is an absorbing look at how grief can fracture a marriage. Christine is a flash-point in John and Laura’s relationship. Although John accuses Laura of not being able to cope, it’s plain that he too has not come to grips with her death and the accompanying issues of guilt. (He insisted the children should be allowed to play outside without supervision.) It is he, not Laura, who sees visions of what might be their daughter. And it is he who reacts with overt hostility to the possibility that two old women might be communicating with Christine.

The way in which Roeg shifts the tone from that of a domestic tragedy to a supernatural thriller is one of Don’t Look Now’s pleasures. It happens so gradually that the change is almost imperceptible. Suddenly, there’s tension, suspense, and an ominous sense of dread. By the final frame, all the pieces have dropped into place, but there are moments of delicious uncertainty and chaos that rear up before the resolutions have been provided.

Some of Roeg’s cues are taken from Hitchcock, but the aspect of Don’t Look Now’s style most remembered by movie-goers is the cross-cutting. This happens throughout the film, creating a sense of parallelism between events that would not normally be connected, but it is most evident in two scenes. The first is the opening one, with John and Laura inside as their children play outside. The second is the sex scene, which interweaves images of the two making love with post-coital shots of them dressing for dinner.

Venice comes alive but not in ways the tourism bureau would approve of. The canals, long part of the city’s romantic image, are shown to be murky and unappealing. Trash floats on their surfaces and rats scurry along the banks. The streets are dim and dank – the kinds of places one rushes through unless in a large group. Clouds hang low over the city, casting a gray pall. One of Italy’s storied cities of beauty and color has been re-imagined as a location from a gothic horror story.

The two lead performances are strong, with Sutherland’s defensive interpretation of the devout unbeliever contrasting effectively with Christie’s warmer, more desperate portrayal. We come to sympathize more with her than with him. Laura is a naturally tragic character; John is a little too dour to relate to on an intimate level.

The passage of time has been kind to the movie. Aside from Sutherland’s hairstyle, little of Don’t Look Now feels dated. It works effectively as a period piece and, because of Roeg’s atypical style, it retains a freshness and grittiness that allows it to work for a new generation of film-goers in much the same way it worked for those who saw it 40 years ago.

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