[Film Review] Don't Look Now (1973)

Some of the most memorable modern horror movies (including À l'intérieur, The Invitation, The Babadook and Hereditary) bloom around characters' grief. In 1973, Nicolas Roeg's classic film Don't Look Now was released, leading the way for filmmakers to examine tragedy, its aftermath and grief through the lens of horror. 

Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the film begins with a happy family of four on a rainy day in England. Parents John and Laura are cosy inside, while the brother is playing on his bike, and his sister is running along the edge of the pond in their yard, her red raincoat and long blonde hair reflecting in the water. The father is examining slides of an Italian church when liquid is spilled onto the image, giving it a bloody sheen. His expression changes to one of dread, as if he knows something is horribly wrong.

When he dashes outside, he finds his daughter Christine lifeless in their pond. He drags her from the water, and as his wife's anguished scream rings out, the viewer is transported to Venice, Italy, where John is working on a commission to restore an old church. Throughout Don't Look Now, abrupt scene changes like this one remind us of what the grieving parents John and Laura (played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) will soon learn: in the aftermath of a tragedy, grieving is not a linear process. 

Despite what they've endured, there is real joy and love between John and Laura. The film features a sex scene that was considered scandalous when Don't Look Now originally premiered in the 1970s, but what's more eye-catching is the previous scene. While Laura is in the bath, John hops in the shower, and they're shown being casually (and comfortably) naked together, enjoying one another's company and teasing each other in their hotel room. The sex scene that follows (which is more notable for how tender it is than for its explicitness) only emphasizes the happiness and comfort these two are still able to find with each other.

While dining at their hotel, Laura meets two eccentric sisters with witchy vibes. One of the sisters is physically blind, but she is also psychic, and she wastes no time telling Laura that she sees Christine sitting with the couple at their table. The sisters show up again at the church John is restoring, and Laura immediately opens up more about her daughter, even revealing that John had a premonition before her death. Later, Laura participates in a séance with the sisters while John anxiously wanders around the dark hotel, eventually being mistaken for a peeping Tom after he's spotted trying to spy on the séance.

After the séance, the psychic sister warns Laura that John is in danger if he stays in Venice, and Laura believes it is Christine warning them to leave. John does not agree, even though immediately after this scene, he's standing on scaffolding at the church that suddenly collapses. He's left hanging in mid-air for an almost comically long time as the folks on the ground scramble to think up a rescue plan. 

While John insists that Christine is gone for good, Laura is buoyed by the thought that their daughter is still with them in spirit. Here their grieving diverges -- John refuses to accept the spiritual comfort offered by the sisters, while it provides a welcome relief for Laura. 

After Laura returns to England to visit their young son at his boarding school, John is shocked when he sees her dressed in all black on a rather sombre-looking gondola with the two sisters. Since he's also been seeing a small person in a red raincoat (echoing his daughter's outfit on her last day) scurrying around Venice ever since they arrived, the Laura sighting makes John's reality even more cloudy. Even during a solitary walk along the canal, he looks down to see a reflection of his daughter playing in her red raincoat, then looks up to see a small person in a red raincoat, their face hidden from view. Is it his daughter? Is it a doppelgänger? And are these sightings of his wife and daughter real? Or are they his mind's way of dealing with his grief?

While John and Laura are grappling with the aftermath of their familial tragedy, the Venetians are dealing with being stalked by a mysterious serial killer, lending an even eerier air to the city scenes in the film. The canals and streets are almost always desolate, and portrayed in gray and brown tones. John and Laura's walks beside the canal do not look romantic, and the strolls through the tunnel-like streets look more dangerous than enticing. Don't Look Now is hardly a tourism ad for Venice – as one of the eccentric sisters says, it's "a city in aspic, wrapped over from a dinner party, where all the guests are dead or gone."

As Don't Look Now builds to its shocking climax, John becomes increasingly troubled as he tries to put all the pieces together – both literally and figuratively. His job is to restore the church physically; he must match mosaics and materials from the past and present. Not everything fits together smoothly, and not all the things he's seen in Venice fit together logically. To make his quagmire even murkier, John isn't fluent in Italian, so he's not able to understand much of the dialogue spoken in the film. There are no subtitles for the Italian spoken in the film, so viewers also feel John's confusion. 

Many things in Don't Look Now are like skewed reflections: John cannot trust his ears, just as the psychic sister cannot trust her eyes; John pulls a soaking wet baby doll out of the canal, as a horrible echo of the day he had to pull his daughter's body out of their pond; and the church, where many come to seek comfort, is a place where John nearly meets his end. The psychic sister acknowledges the many reflections in Venice to John, telling him, "The sound changes...  as you come to a canal, and the echoes near the walls are so clear." 

But are the echoes real? Don't Look Now is a film full of reflections in water and reflections in mirrors – but ultimately, it proves that reflections cannot always be trusted. 

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