John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife, Laura Baxter (Julie Christie), live with their son, Johnny (Nicholas Salter), and daughter, Christine (Sharon Williams) in the English countryside. John restores old buildings and is looking at slides of old churches when John gets a strange feeling. He races outside and encounters his son who tells him that Christine has fallen into a pond. John races to the pond but is too late. His daughter has drowned.
While trying to deal with the loss of their daughter, the Baxters travel to Venice where John has been hired by Bishop Barbarrigo (Massimo Serato) to restore an old church. One day Laura meets two women, Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather (Hilary Mason). Heather is blind and a psychic. She tells Laura that see can see Christine in the spirit world and that she is happy. Laura, anxious to grasp on to any hope of being able to see her daughter in the afterlife, begins to believe. Heather tells Laura that John is also psychic but isn’t aware of it and doesn’t know how to use his gift. John, on the other hand, is a realist and tries to convince Laura that Christine is dead and there is no coming back from that. He maintains that Heather is a charlatan.
Laura agrees to allow Heather and Wendy to have a séance. In the séance Christine says that John is in danger and should leave Venice. John refuses to give in to what he believes is nonsense. When the owners of the school that Johnny goes to calls and says he was in a slight accident, Laura goes to England to be with him while John stays to continue working on the reconstruction. An accident that almost kills him begins to make him think more about what the physic said.
While Laura is supposedly in England John believes he sees her in a funeral procession with the two sisters. John contacts the police. Inspector Longhi (Renato Scarpa), who is also investigating a series of murders of women who were killed by drowning, questions John. John’s weak responses, about his wife’s disappearance, prompt Longhi to suspect John in the killings. John’s confusion deepens when he finds out that Laura is still in England. He begins to go down somewhat of a rabbit hole when he starts seeing a small red cloaked figure that reminds him of his dead daughter. He pursues the figure through the streets and alleyways of Venice looking for answers. What he finds is not good.
“Don’t Look Now” was released in 1973 and was directed by Nicolas Roeg. It is an Italian British psychological horror thriller with giallo influences. The film was based on a 1971 short story by Daphne Du Maurier. Part of the movie is in Italian, but that doesn’t impact the story negatively. The main characters mostly speak English. The Italian actually adds an interesting dimension to the film.
The most talked about part of the movie is the sex scene between Sutherland’s and Christie’s characters. The scene has taken over the film and made the horror and thriller aspects of the movie seem insufficient. Some believe that the scene was real, but Sutherland maintains it wasn’t and that it was actually uncomfortable to film. It stands today as one of the sexiest scenes ever filmed. The thing I liked the most about the scene is that the love making was initiated by Laura and not John. It added a sense of love and not just sex. It wasn’t gratuitous; it was integral to the relationship between the two main characters.
Water and the color red are reoccurring motifs throughout the film. Red usually pops up whenever something bad happens or there is a premonition of some kind. Water is how Christine dies and is also the method of murder for the serial killer. There are a few spots where the film’s symbolisms become a little difficult to understand but the final twist at the end brings a lot of needed closure. It is a well-done film that explores grief and its impact on relationships in a horror setting.