Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, and Clelia Matania in Don't Look Now

Cast: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Leopoldo Trieste, Giorgio Trestini, David Tree, Ann Rye, Nicholas Salter, Sharon Williams, Bruno Cattaneo, Adalina Poerio. Screenplay: Allan Scott, Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Art direction: Giovanni Socol. Film editing: Graeme Clifford. Music: Pino Donaggio.

A beautifully textured film, Don't Look Now fills every frame with portents, making it one of the most influential "horror films" of all time. And like the best horror films, like Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), it doesn't rest content with simply scaring people. It's unsettling mostly because it preys not on our nerves but on our conscience, needling our sense of guilt, our self-consciousness about grief, our denial in the face of the inevitability of death. Its supernatural element is preposterous, but we accept it because each of us has our preposterous superstitions, our wishful fantasies, our falling away from logic and reason. Nicolas Roeg accomplishes a near-perfect integration of story and setting in his use of Venice, a beautiful, historic city, riddled with decay and threatened by time and tide. In his hands, it becomes a correlative for the dance between acceptance and despair that the Baxters, Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland), are treading as they try to survive the death of their daughter. I think the film falls apart a little at the end, with too much flashbackery to summarize what has happened to the Baxters, and it could have been leavened with the kind of wit that Hitchcock and Polanski resorted to in their films, but I'd call it a near-miss classic.