Don't Look Now movie review & film summary (1973)

The city is old and ominous. John struggles to raise a statue to its perch on a church wall, and then uncovers it to reveal a hideous gargoyle, sticking its tongue out at him. A church scaffold collapses beneath him. The hotel where the Baxters are staying is eager to close at the end of season; the lobby furniture is already shrouded. The canals yield drowned bodies. And John’s concern mounts as his wife listens to the two strange sisters, and becomes convinced their daughter is sending them messages. “She’s dead, Laura,” John says. “Our daughter is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.”

But it is John who has second sight. “He has the gift, even if he doesn’t know it, even if he’s resisting it,” the sisters tell one another. And after Laura is called home to be with their son, who has had a minor accident at boarding school, John sees her and the sisters standing at the front of a motorboat passing him on the Grand Canal. How can she be here and there? Those who have been to Venice will recognize it as a funeral boat.

The plot of “Don’t Look Now,” if it were summarized in a realistic way, would be fairly standard horror stuff. The identification of the red-hooded figure is arbitrary and perhaps even unnecessary. It is the film’s visual style, acting, and mood that evoke its uncanny power. Like the recent films of M. Night Shyamalan, it works through apprehension, not plot or action. The “explanation”: is perfunctory but the dread is palpable.

The movie is based by a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. “Romantic sludge,” Michael Dempsey calls it in his Film Quarterly review, explaining how the screenplay extends and deepens it but does not improve on the device of the hooded red figure. Dempsey makes a key point about the film’s use of montage: Unlike Eisenstein, who suggests shots are linked, he says, Roeg and Clifford put together shots that might be linked. We are always as uncertain as John Baxter about the connections between what he sees, what exists, what will exist, what does not exist.

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