Midway through Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg’s ecstatic meditation on grief, which turns 50 this month, a character offers a thought that, for me, sums up the terror that is the film’s beating, crimson heart. “I wish I didn’t have to believe in prophecy,” Bishop Barbarrigo (Massimo Serato) tells John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) after a near-death experience. “I do, but I wish I didn’t have to.”
On the surface, it’s a simple declaration of Barbarrigo’s duty as a man of faith, a thought that comes only after Baxter reveals that he was warned danger was coming for him. But look a little deeper, and it’s Roeg speaking to his audience, letting us know that the central heartbreak of this film is a prophecy that has no choice but to come true. Through dazzling cinematic techniques, brilliant central performances, and emotions that kick into operatic overdrive, Don’t Look Now achieves a kind of claustrophobic, inevitable terror that makes it one of the best thrillers not just of its era, but of all time. It creates a dreadfully beautiful environment in which everything is not just inevitable, but all-encompassing.
The plot, derived from a story by the great Daphne Du Maurier, is both straightforward and satisfyingly Gothic. John (Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) have moved to Venice in the wake of their daughter’s drowning death in England, so John can work on restoring a church in the legendary Italian city. Laura is, understandably, not taking the loss of her daughter well, but that changes when she meets a pair of sisters, one of whom (Hilary Mason) is a blind psychic who can seemingly see Laura’s daughter trying to communicate with her parents. Laura’s spirits are immediately lifted by the idea of contacting her daughter in the next world, while John tries to shrug the supposed messages off…even as he begins to see a mysterious figure moving through Venice’s backstreets, dressed in a red coat that’s all too similar to the one his daughter used to wear.
That red coat is vital, because no matter how passive a viewer you are when it comes to Don’t Look Now, you will notice the recurring motif of the color red. It permeates the film, existing in nearly every frame, and certainly in every scene at some point or another. Red can, of course, represent many things in the spectrum of human emotions. It’s anger, it’s passion, it’s violence; for the Baxters it is also grief, a reminder of the vibrant life they lost to the waters outside their English country home. Roeg’s camera always makes sure to pick up that reminder of life, of a beating heart brought to a standstill, plucking red out of the drab stone streets and muted tones of hotel rooms and crumbling churches. It’s a heavy psychological reminder of why we’re here, what’s driving the story, but it’s also key to what I think is the most effective part of the film, which we’ll get to shortly.
Then there’s the water. It’s the first thing we see in the film, and very nearly the last, as Roeg uses its primal natural force to punctuate the thrumming dread at the core of the film. Du Maurier’s original story kills off the Baxters’ daughter through an illness, which Don’t Look Now switches to a drowning, so that when John and Laura head to Venice, they’re surrounded by a flowing, crashing reminder of what’s left them. The sound of water, trickling and rushing and pattering against windows, is heard all through the film, sometimes even when it shouldn’t be heard. No matter where the Baxters are or what they’re doing, the water seems to get in.
So, too, does the grief. The psychological impacts of grief and how different people cope with it are, of course, a key element of Don’t Look Now‘s emotional power, and Roeg amplifies and enhances those impacts through liberal use of techniques that suggest a psychological landscape well beyond the physical one in the film. Every department in the film has a role to play in this amplification, but I want to specifically highlight the work of editor Graeme Clifford and sound editor Rodney Holland here. Alongside Roeg, both men create a nightmarish sense of grief that surrounds and envelopes not just the Baxters, but every major character in the film. Roeg and Clifford weave together match-cuts, jump cuts, dissolves, looped shots, and all manner of other editing tricks, creating an environment in which we’re not entirely sure what we’re seeing at any given time. Is it a glimpse of the future? A peek at the past? An edit for simple emphasis? This is especially exemplified in the film’s infamous sex scene, which intercuts the Baxters making love for the first time in a long time with shots of them getting dressed, having drinks, eyeing themselves in mirrors. It’s a technique used so liberally that it seems both things are happening at the same time.
The film’s use of sound is similarly disorienting. Just as the waters of Venice, and the waters of the Baxter family pond, echo throughout Don’t Look Now, the Baxters frequently hear the cries of babies as they move through the city, even when we don’t see them onscreen, and sirens permeate the night air whether they’re indoors or out. These sounds, and many others like them, are a reminder of what the Baxters have lost, yes, but they’re also key to another element of the plot: The claim, from the blind psychic, that John is in danger, and that his daughter’s spirit has come to Venice to try and warn him.
Through the film’s bold use of color, sound, and editing, we feel the Baxters’ desires, their ambitions, their longing, and of course their grief with the depth of unfathomable waters. All of these things are intense and seemingly limitless, but nothing feels more limitless than the film’s sense of dread as it closes in on John Baxter, on the prophecy that we wish we didn’t have to believe in about his eventual fate.
That sense of dread fills every crack and crevice like water, which brings us back to the film’s use of symbolism, and what it really achieves. Water flows into any opening it’s allowed, fills any vessel it enters to that vessel’s exact shape. It’s continuous, but it’s also mercurial, boundless, able to spread in all directions, able to take just about anything with it along the way. That sense of water’s power, coupled with Roeg’s effort to give us the sense of prophecy and doom layered over the narrative, creates the feeling that time in the film is like water, shapeless and flowing and able to fill any void.
Everything is happening all at once. Venice was sinking from the moment it was built. John Baxter was always doomed, even if he didn’t want to believe in prophecy. We feel the power of water throughout the film because John never left that pond where his daughter drowned, never clawed his way out of those dark and destructive waters. We see red all through the film because John’s not just remembering his daughter’s death, but surrounded by it. Every time we see red, she’s dying again, and John is dying already.
Everyone deals with grief in their own way. For some, it’s like water, all-encompassing and deep and dark, leaving you to tread in it until you inevitably go under. That’s what grief is for John Baxter, and that’s the central tragedy of Don’t Look Now, the thing that takes all of Roeg’s ecstatic filmmaking and wraps it up in inevitable, stunning heartbreak. Five decades later, it still cuts just as deep.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.