Don't Look Now
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Movie Reviews of Don't Look Now
Movie Review: A Masterpiece of its Genre...Of Any Genre
Summary: 5 Stars
Nicolas Roeg proved he was a filmmaking genius in 1971 with Walkabout.
In 1973, he released Don't Look Now, a horror film, that isn't watched by many today but in my mind cements his status as a brilliant filmmaker. Don't Look Now is not a typical horror film. It works with dread, not with fright. It is a series of images that lead up to the final shocking climax, much like Rosemary's Baby. The difference between this film and that film is this movie has a lot more unsettling images leading to the climax. In fact, this movie's all about unsettling images and its opening sequence establishes that quickly. The movie's opening sequence truly ranks up there with one of the best. The movie opens, sometime in autumn, in the British countryside home of John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland & Julie Christie). Inside, they're working. John is studying slides of Venetian churches. In the slide he's studying there appears to be a figure wearing a shiny red raincoat. Outside, their children play. Their son is riding his bike, their daughter Christine, wearing a shiny plastic raincoat, plays by a pond. Christine throws her ball into the bond, her brother runs over a pane of glass, inside John looks up as if sensing the sound. He spills a glass, a red stain appears on the slide. It looks like blood. The next shot shows Christine lying face down in the pond. John gets up, runs outside, wades across the pond, and grabs his daughters' body with a cry of grief. This, of course, sets up the plot of the entire movie as well as the visual theme of the movie. In the next scene, John and Laura are in Venice while John restores an old church. Their son is at a school back in Britain. While at a restaurant, Laura meets two old women named Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania). Heather's blind and, Wendy claims, psychic. Pretty soon, Heather tells Laura that she has seen Christine laughing and that she's happy. Laura is shocked and, returning to the table where her husband is, she passes out. When she awakes at the hospital, she finds herself believing the women, and her and John go back to the house for a graphic sex scene. That's not accurate; it is graphic, but also realistic and passionate. Intercut with scene of John and Laura dressing afterward. As the plot progresses, John begins to see a figure wearing a shiny red raincoat running around Venice. John is a man who doesn't believe in omens or ghosts or the afterlife. Even though his wife is happy about what Heather has told her, and he lets her have her happiness, he sees it as a bunch of mumbo jumbo. In one scene, Heather tells Laura that it's John who has second sight. "He has the gift, even if he doesn't know it, even if he's resisting it." I've left out several key parts in the plot, because I might inadvertently give you an idea of what happens by explaining them. But the movie has a great, haunting, twist ending that I'm surprised doesn't get more attention. Sure, you realize what's going to happen a few moments before it does...But it's still very well done. Roeg and his editor took a risk by placing one key-scene in the film that could've ruined this ending. The scene is when Laura has gone back to Britain, because their son has had a minor accident. As John travels across the Grand Canal, he sees his wife and the two sisters pass him. How could this be? Is it a mistake? A fantasy? This scene is one of the most haunting scenes in the movie, but it won't click with most people until the end...And yes, it didn't click with me either. Don't Look Now is a masterpiece of horror, whether it's the kind of horror you enjoy or not. It's got great performances, directorial brilliance, and great cinematography. In other words, see it.
GRADE: A-
Movie Review: Disturbing film full of brooding, terrifying moments
Summary: 5 Stars
"Don't Look Now" appeared out of nowhere to revitalize the suspense genre. Despite the supernatural elements, this isn't a horror movie but a thriller like the type Hitchcock might have made if he had incorporated supernatural elements into his films during their prime. A film about loss (both loss of life, sanity, spouse and child)and an obsessive desire to find perhaps try and reclaim what's gone, "Don't Look Now" uses what would have been considered a stylized approach to thrillers (again, not unlike Hitchcock in his prime which is appropriate given that Allan Scott and Chris Bryant based their creepy screenplay on a Daphne Du Maurier story. Du Maurier wrote three stories that Hitchcock based film upon). While elements of it seem almost conventional visually it's still quite stunning and unique.
"Don't Look Now" begins with a tranquil moment at the Baxter home. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is examining slides of a church he's renovating in Venice). His wife Laura(the beautiful and talented Julie Christie) is reading. Their two children a boy and a girl wearing a red hooded raincoat are playing outside after a recent rain storm. While examining one of the slides John notices a red hooded figure in one of the shots of the church. He doesn't recall seeing it when he took the original pictures and it isn't in the next. He spills water on the slide. The red dye from the hood spreads across the slide like blood. Suddenly, John has a premonition; his daughter is in danger. He runs out only to discover she's drowned.
Some time has passed and while John and Laura are in Venice for the restoration, they meet a pair of sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania) one of whom claims to be psychic (she's also blind). The psychic sister claims to have seen the ghost of the Baxter's little girl. What are their motives are they here to help? His Laura spirals into what could be madness, John becomes obsessed with finding the red hooded figure from his slide as it turns up in the psychic's vision. There's also a mysterious murderer working the streets of Venice which figures into the plot as well.
Roeg's dreamlike pacing, use of colors and imaginery makes "Don't Look Now" an atmospheric marvel and the type of suspense film that builds from the inside out; that is most of the suspense comes from the characters and lanquid pacing not from rapid fire cutting and gore. It's subtle and, if you're expecting something like the film "Scream" (which is quite a good film although very different stylistically), you'll be bored and disappointed.
Sadly, the Paramount DVD has no extras except for the trailer, no commentary but it is an anamorphic transfer of the film and it does positively splendid with the rich colors of the original theatrical print well preserved. It's a pity that Roeg wasn't asked to do a commentary track (nor Sutherland or Christie two terrific actors that are in their prime here). It's a pity. Perhaps Criterion will license this and add the extras that we've come to expect for many of these classic suspense thrillers.
For a really creepy evening, "Don't Look Now" with its disquieting images, dream like pacing and startling ending will do perfectly. The print and transfer look marvelous and the soundtrack (although in mono and not remixed for stereo), sounds good as well. "Don't Look Now" really deserves the type of detailed DVD that "Murder on the Orient Express" recently received. Although this isn't a perfect DVD, it's really exceptional and worth picking up for fans of suspense thrillers.
Movie Review: One of my favorite movies
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first saw this movie in the theater, I was so captivated by it that I went back the next day and saw it again. (It was so overwhelming that I couldn't think of anything else, anyway.) I just dug around in my files, and (miraculously!) found the review I wrote December 31, 1973. It was long, but here are parts of it:I started with a description of du Maurier's original story (it wasn't a novel): "An English couple vacationing in Venice meets up with two Scottish women, twins, one blind and 'psychic.' She tells them--or the wife, Laura, as the husband wants nothing to do with them--that their recently-drowned daughter is with the couple, that she is happy and wants them to be happy, and that they should leave Venice because there is 'danger.' A telegram from England that their son is sick sends Laura back on the first plane, with John to follow by train. But before he leaves he sees Laura and the twins boating down the Grand Canal, and certain that the twins have done something to his wife he starts searching the sinking city for them. That's as far as I'll take this synopsis.
"The film is practically a textbook exampke of how to turn a printed story into a movie. For instance, the telegram from England is turned into a phone call. Beyond that, there is a care taken with the characters that du Maurier did not bother with: The minor characters are, all of them (with one necessary exception that I won't go into here, and the sisters--not twins--who remain enigmatic), are more than one-dimensional. No-one is there only for his plot purposes. Everyone with a part bigger than a walk-on has a little scene in which he gets to show us a little about himslef that isn't necessary for us to know, but which fleshes out his personality. The major change is to make John not a vacationer; he is in Venice not to relax but to work.
"I could go on and on about the film: the acting (Donald Sutherland is great, Julie Christie the best I've seen her), the photography (rich and beautiful; Venice is strikingly, almost attractively, ugly), the music, everything. I highly recommend this movie."
I recommended seeing the movie without reading the story first--or at all--"except in this case: If suspense in a movie theater, where there are no commercials and you can't put the book down briefly, might cause you some anguish (I'm being serious here), read the story first so you know what to expect, and just enjoy the movie as a movie."
So, as you can see, even when I was in my early 20s I didn't find the movie slow, or nothing but symbolism, or any of the other complaints by the minority here. And seeing it again now, on this beautiful DVD, hasn't changed my opinion. It's marvelous. I find it interesting that I didn't even mention the sex scene in my review, though it certainly was then and is still now a great scene, the cross-cutting very appropriate to the characters and where they are in their lives.
My best friend then wrote me a long letter explaining to me that I was totally wrong about the film, that it was too arty and too mechanical and too long ("a two-hour toothache") and besides, it scared him too much....
I think you should risk the toothache, in case it turns out you like it as much as I do.
Movie Review: Pure psychological fear
Summary: 5 Stars
This film had a shattering impact on me when I first saw it in the theater in its first run in 1974. I was in a jittery state for several weeks, and had many dreams and nightmares influenced by it. "The Exorcist" had come out at the same time, a well-made but conventional horror film. "Don't Look Now" is far from conventional and much more deeply frightening if one is receptive to its elusive mood. It has an avant garde editing and directorial style by the sophisticated English cinematographer-turned-director, Nicholas Roeg, whose other films include the experimental "Performance" with Mick Jagger, the brilliantly photographed "Walkabout" set in the Australian outback, and the surreal "Man Who Fell to Earth" starring David Bowie.Roeg's intimate, first-hand knowledge of cinematography influences the manner in which the supernatural is suggested, with simple yet unsettling shots of ordinary but sinister objects, vague streetcorners, deep shadows, or fleeting figures disappearing behind buildings. Despite the main setting in picturesque Venice, the realism of the style ties these eerie images to everyday experience.
The entire film in a sense is an attempt at re-defining what the supernatural really is. Not slimy zombies or ghosts in white shrouds but strange coincidences in otherwise ordinary images - tiles of a mosaic being shattered by a footstep, or a pane of glass being broken by a bicycle wheel. These little unexplained connections between events accumulate over the course of the film, and then are all brought together in the powerful and terrifying finale.
Pino Donnagio's music score adds immeasureably to the atmosphere, and later caused Brian de Palm to use the composer for the scores of "Carrie," "Blowout" and "Dressed to Kill." This morose but romantic Italian is one of the few film composers able to supply a music score as vivid as the great Bernard Herrmann.
Donald Sutherland brings his method realism to a fine pitch in the role of the psychic yet skeptical modern man - a disbelieving soul who is nevertheless restoring an ancient church. And the delicate, fragile beauty and understated yet deeply felt acting of Julie Christie is perfect for the role of his loving but grief-stricken wife.
Quite simply there has never been another film like this one. Though Shyamalan's "Sixth Sense" is a noble attempt at creating a similar intense and weird atmosphere, there will probably never be another. It is truly a unique creation and certainly one of the finest films about the supernatural ever made.
The DVD has few extras, but is an excellent transfer, extremely crisp and clear. Probably one doesn't need extras with this film, because it is a deliberate and inexplicable cinematic enigma. In a day when dumbed-down films beat one over the head with their often idiotic plots, it is immensely refreshing and inspiring to see such a work of subtle cinematic art as "Don't Look Now."
Movie Review: The most subtle and sophisticated horror film of its day
Summary: 5 Stars
Red is the color of life as surely as it is also the color of death...Faith is a delusional form of confinement to some, and to others it is a liberation...Life evolves out of fluid and into fluid it returns; life & death are often both water-borne...The search for rational answers may lead even the most self-assured to unsuspecting destruction. Around such binaries Nicolas Roeg has constructed one of the most troubling and beautiful horror films ever lensed in "Don't Look Now"--
The movie came out in December, 1973 in the United States, which is when I saw it as a college student during Xmas break. For those too young to remember, or not yet born, it was at the height of the near-hysteria & media circus surrounding Wm. Friedkin's "The Exorcist"--a far less sophisticated, but much more commercially successful film.
I knew nothing of Agatha Christie's short story, and had only seen Roeg's work as a cinematographer ("Masque of the Red Death" "Fahrenheit 451") at that point. So, as a stressed-out student under too much pressure from school and self-generated personal problems, and in a state of mind that could only be described as Strindbergian, "Don't Look Now" struck me w/tremendous and unforgettable power. It has never seemed any less striking to me, even now after almost 40 years, and countless viewings.
This film is probably the finest depiction of Venice as a grim, sinister locale--part tomb, part watery labyrinth housing a different kind of red-clad Minotaur--rivalled only by L.P. Hartley's "Podolo" or Ian McEwan's THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS, both works of literature yet with some affinities to Roeg's movie. And yes, the film does have a precursor, although an undistinguished one: the 1972 Aldo Lado giallo, "Who Saw Her Die?"(Chi l'ha vista morire?, aka The Child) a somewhat less-than-memorable effort that deals with the murder of a child in Venice, and is well-done as such things go, but is by no means in the same league as Roeg's masterpiece.
I'm not aware of any other film that portrays the ambiguities of belief and faith with more artistry than "Don't Look Now"; fewer still are the films that convey an atmosphere of impending doom and human tragedy with greater & more piercing effect.
For all of the cruel jibes about 70's "styles" and such, this movie has aged beautifully. {Just imagine how the snotty, cotton-candy films of today will look in thirty or forty years!}
In a film this great, DVD "extras" are superfluous. Who cares what this or that performer, or even the director thought or felt? The work of art speaks for itself...In any case, as Donald Sutherland's character casually remarks, unwittingly, "Nothing is what it seems."
Not to be missed or dismissed, and never to be forgotten, "Don't Look Now" still rates as high a rank as I could possibly give ANY film.