Director(s)	Nicolas Roeg
Principal Cast	Julie Christie as Laura Donald Sutherland as John Sharon Williams as Christine Nicholas Salter as Johnny Hilary Mason as Heather Clelia Matania as Wendy Massimo Serato as Bishop Barbarrigo Renato Scarpa as Inspector Longhi
Release Date	1973
Language(s)	English
Running Time	110 minutes

A little girl, Christine, runs along in her shiny red raincoat, playing with a ball near an ominous looking lake. Her brother, Johnny, who’s biking near her, runs over a glass surface and breaks it. An unlucky omen. Their father, John, turns in his seat, almost as if aware of the disturbance despite being firmly positioned in his house. Johnny looks at his bike, attempting to figure out the damage done to it. He looks back and sees his little sister in the background, clearly visible next to the lake.

Christine tosses her ball up and the movie cuts to John tossing his wife, Laura, a pack of cigarettes. Christine’s ball drops into the pond creating a splash and the movie cuts back to John as he spills a glass of water over a slide he’s looking at.

Psychic connections and shared actions. An insert of the ball floating without Christine. Her missing presence tells us all we need to know before the movie cuts back to John looking at the damaged slide.

The slide which up to this point depicted a small figure adorned in a shiny red raincoat transforms into a bloody mess, as the water spreads the red color around like a pool of blood. John moves towards the outside, as though he knows something awful has transpired. Laura picks up the slide, takes a quick look, and tosses it on the couch seat next to her. A quick cut of Christine’s unmoving body in the water is followed by Johnny running to get his father.

It’s clear what’s coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch.  As John jumps into water the movie constantly cuts between him howling in pain, holding his daughter’s corpse and the slide, whose red color continues to expand. The music is daunting and ominous until suddenly an uplifting melody plays. At this moment, the slide transforms once more as the red flow of water becomes a rainbow of colors, almost like a beam of light through a prism.

 John gets out of the water and tries to resuscitate Christine, but it’s far too late to do anything for her as she is. Mustering the last bit of strength in his body, he moves towards the house, barely coherent as his face contorts in pain. Laura sees him coming the window holding their dead daughter and screams. This scream transforms into the sound of a drill as the movie cuts to the couple in Italy, the main location for the rest of the movie, and the place where the couple’s respective journey to deal with the pain of their loss starts.

This almost 8-minute opening perfectly encapsulates everything that makes up Roeg’s masterpiece, Don’t Look Now. It’s a story about grief, hardship, and suffering. That much is obvious from the drawn out and emotionally devastating depiction of Christine’s death and her parents’ subsequent responses. The use of both visual and auditory match-cuts reinforces the psychic relationships between seemingly unrelated events and the way that aspects of life can bleed into and affect one another. The visual representation of the transforming slide highlights the way perspective and time can alter the way images are perceived. At first, it’s a plain image that John looks at curiously – the object of interest not immediately understood by the audience. Then the small red figure transforms into a blood spiral. A premonition of the violence to come. But interestingly enough, Roeg doesn’t stop here. He lingers on the slide until the blood red flow transforms into a shining rainbow. This combined with the uplifting melody that plays immediately before it suggests that the image can be read in another way. In another light. A refraction of sorts. Almost like truth is perspectival and something that can’t be ascertained in the moment. This is confirmed by the final match cut, this time auditory as opposed to visual, which transforms Laura’s scream into the sound of a drill being used at John’s new place of employment.  Now it’s impressive enough that this level of seamless editing and visual and auditory storytelling could be sustained in such a cohesive manner for 8 minutes.

However, what makes this movie a true cinematic tour-de-force is that it continues to expand and build upon all these of these ideas for the rest of the near 2-hour run-time in a similar fashion. The movie never lets up in its use of immaculate cross-cutting to constantly reinforce the idea that life is an accumulation of elements that circle around one another in a series of interpretations and re-interpretations. The early motifs involving water, reflections, refractions, duplicate images, and psychic connections are all pushed to their poetic limits to create a finely tuned tale that constantly subverts your expectations in the best way possible. Through its use of consistent visual motifs, the movie manages to use flashbacks and flashforwards in ways that feel integrated into the very essence of the narrative. A body of water transforms into rain which transforms into grey colored eyes, connecting fragments of the story happening at different times and in different places. Nothing feels out of place because the “place” you’re watching is constantly transforming before your eyes. Just like the slide, the end goal/image can only be understood by watching the story’s full progression up to that point and even that understanding is open to interpretation.

At the heart of the story is the tale of a couple desperately trying to communicate with another and recover from the grief and emotional devastation caused by the loss of their child. John’s new job involves moving to Italy for a while as he helps to renovate an old dilapidated Church. While having lunch with Laura, he runs into Heather and Wendy, two sisters who seem to show a heavy interest in the grieving couple. The former, who happens to be blind, claims that she’s a psychic who can see the spirit of Christine. She tells Laura that her daughter is happy and “with” the couple. This affirmation in some kind of spiritual afterlife along with the image of her happy daughter brings Laura out of her depressive state. She wholeheartedly puts her faith in the two strangers and their proclamations and finds a newfound energy that gives her back a sense of meaning. When she mentions this to John, the latter scoffs at it as foolish and quite literally walks his own path away from Laura. He refuses to entertain the idea that his daughter could still be “there” and closes himself off more.

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This sharp contrast between the two exemplifies the subjective nature of responding to grief and how being open versus being closed can lead to radically different conclusions and actions. Throughout the movie, John continues to be closed, suspicious, and unable to openly say what he wants to say. This is a characteristic that’s demonstrated by all the men in the movie from his employer, Bishop Barbarrigo to a police inspector, Longhi.  On the other hand, all the women in the movie are open and cordial with one another, operating with good faith with respect to one another. As the plot progresses and interactions between different sets of characters occur, the effects of one’s predisposition towards possibility and openness become far more pronounced. Male to male communication scenes are awkward and cold. Women to women communication scenes are open and receptive. Added to this jumble is Roeg’s genius decision to not include subtitles for any of the Italian spoken in the movie. That’s right. A movie set in Italy, with only a few English-speaking characters, has no subtitles for what the majority of the background characters have to say. There are multiple scenes of John communicating with town folk in Italian and it’s impossible to determine if he’s actually saying something meaningful or just getting confused. The lack of subtitles also amplifies the uneasiness we feel, because like John, every interaction is an “unknown.” This means that we, the audience, have to make a determination on what characters intentions and actions really entail. Like John, we can be suspicious and read the situations with a cold rationality. Or like Laura, we can read the situations with an intuitive and affective sensibility.

Of course this level of emotional resonance would only be possible if the actors involved were capable of bringing a wide range of affective reactions to the situations that unfold. The way Donald Sutherland expresses his grief in early scenes and rage in later scenes is not only wholeheartedly believe but emotionally devastating. It hurts to watch him suffer and anguish in the guilt he feels over Christine’s death. Serving as a counterbalance of sorts, Julie Christy brings a genuine sense of life and and joy into the scenes she’s in. From the way her smile lights up in her eyes as she plays with children in a hospital to the jovial enthusiasm she exhibits while talking to the sisters, she becomes a beacon of hope in an otherwise dour and depressing movie. Hilary Mason’s performance as the movie’s “psychic” is what brings Sutherland and Chrisy’s range together as her depiction of psychic happenings simultaneously feel staged and genuine. The way she contorts , moves, and emotes during these moments feel overtly theatrical and I remember thinking her character was full of it during some scenes and incredibly trustworthy in others. It’s her duality that allows the interpretative schema that underpins the stories logic, narrative, and position respective to the audience to work out. Without all 3 actors nailing their scenes, the attempt at placing the audience in the position of following John versus following Laura , of following cold rationality versus open affectivity, would fail. It’s all about opening up the scene to interpretations.

Things are never what they really seem and becoming steadfast in one perspective destroys the possibility of seeing things through other perspectives. The best part? The movie ends in the same way it began- an immaculate set of cross and match cuts that tie all the strands of the story and themes together in a way that still leaves things up to interpretation. Even after multiple re-watches of this movie, I can honestly say I don’t have it all worked out, but that’s the point. If I did, I wouldn’t have as much watching the movie over and over again.

Report Card

TLDR	Don’t Look Now is one of the best edited movies of all time and manages to make every cut and transition matter. The way the narrative plays with time and perception through its innovative motifs – reflections, refractions, and duplications -is something in a league of its own and transforms this tale of grief, despair, and recovery an impressionistic masterpiece that one needs to experience to believe. If you love movies, you owe it to yourself to watch this one. If you’re a horror fan, that goes doubly for you. There’s rarely a movie that so masterfully combines all of its elements to create a narrative that simultaneously ties up every loose end while leaving them open.
Rating	10/10
Grade	A+

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