Cast: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

Director: Nicholas Roeg

Screenplay: Chris Bryant

Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

Genre: Horror/Drama



CRITIQUE:

Nicholas Roeg’s unsettling Don’t Look Now is not an easy horror film. It’s not an all-out screamfest. The terror is not explicit. There are no sudden split-second frights. The trauma is all implied, and that is why this movie, branded is a horror film, is all the more effective because it plays on your subconscious. This is more on psychological prodding rather than shameless audience terror campaign. The use of imagery here is complex and symbolic: rain lashing on puddles of water, the child figure in a red raincoat and broken mirrors – these are ordinary things made extraordinary in its built-up of a brilliant plot. Technically superb, it also employs a nuanced skill on crosscutting editing, as seen in the premise, the drowning of the daughter (in an emotionally shattering slow-motion), and the notoriously intimate sex scene, showing the couple in a heated tryst whilst cut-backing with them in post-lovemaking bliss. This is a scene that cinema boards would have been harrumphing for censorship nowadays.


But Roeg is not here to make a film for light viewing. The tale of a couple on a holiday in Venice is not what it seems to be. Laura and John Baxter (amazing performances by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, one of cinema’s highly convincing couples) are actually grieving for the loss of their daughter, and a trip in Venice is their way of overcoming the tragedy. Dread is just everywhere in the mouldy, grimy setting of Venice. But at its bitter core, this is about grief and psychological disturbance. Moments of supernatural occurrence suggests that the only ghosts that exist are ghosts of the past. So when John begins his visions of the girl in red, he is mystified and befuddled yet his rationality pins him down. What starts as a spooky chiller turns into a psychological drama, then a supernatural study, and ends in a shockingly human tragedy with a serial killer twist.


VERDICT:

A bitter, piercing study of grief and loss that haunts rather than jolts, which makes Don’t Look Now all the more petrifying and effective. This is horror on a very human level.



RATING: A