Don't Look Now

Based on a Daphne du Maurier short story and made in 1973 , it's one of the most haunting, enigmatic and , in the final moments bloodily shocking films ever made.  After the tragic death of their daughter ,  Laura and John Baxter  take a trip to Venice in an attempt to save their marriage. There, John uses his work -restoring an old church- as an outlet for his grief while Laura relies on pills . One day, they encounter a  strange pair of elderly spinster sisters , Heather and Wendy . Heather, who is blind, claims to be able to communicate with the spirit world. She convinces Laura she has seen Christine.  While John dismisses this as meaningless "mumbo-jumbo," Laura goes along with it - even participating in a séance.  At first ,  John is delighted at the positive change in wife but he soon becomes concerned that she is falling under a harmful influence. To make matters worse,   he is beginning to experience strange visions.  Heather  warns Christine that unless John leaves Venice, he will be in great danger.   Christine's mother and father are played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, and their relationship is one of  the most authentic portraits of a marriage that i have seen in  any film.  Watching the film,  it is easy to believe that the actors are in fact married, and Roeg's portrait of Venice, with its intelligent, non-tourist locations, is a real vision of a real, working city .  The  film  is drenched with sex and displaced sexual longing,  given a dark eroticism by the shadow of death.  In Venice, Baxter will get glimpses of a little figure in red running away from him or hiding from him, and may wonder if this is the ghost of his daughter. We will see the red figure more often than he does, glimpsing it on a distant bridge, or as a boat passes behind two arches.   Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in “Don’t Look Now.”  It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling, its canals alive with rats .  This  film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension. Few films so successfully put us inside the mind of a man who is trying to reason his way free from mounting terror.