In Don’t Look Now, director Nicolas Roeg takes the premise of a ghost story and dresses it in art house clothing, hoping the soft lighting and elliptical editing will distract you from the fact that it’s mostly two miserable people wandering through Venice looking for meaning and instead finding a metaphor with a meat cleaver.
This is a movie that has all the signs of being profound—psychic old ladies, spectral children, ominous water—but spends two hours clanging symbols instead of saying something coherent. By the end, I didn’t know if I’d watched a supernatural thriller or just someone’s very expensive European therapy session.
The Plot (Sort of)
Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland play Laura and John Baxter, grieving the death of their young daughter, Christine, who drowned in a backyard pond while wearing a red raincoat. The couple retreats to Venice, which, in this film, is the world’s saddest travel brochure. There, they meet a pair of spooky elderly sisters—one of whom is blind and clairvoyant and claims Christine is trying to reach out from the other side.
John, like any grieving father in a 1970s film, reacts to this news by shrugging, sighing, and eventually wandering around Venetian alleyways looking haunted. Laura finds some peace. They make love in a scene that plays like an erotic intermission—one part tender, two parts anatomy class.
What unfolds is an endless back-and-forth between creepy omens, waterlogged metaphors, and awkward conversations with Italian detectives. Roeg teases a killer subplot—a string of mysterious murders in Venice—but mostly uses it as set dressing. We’re told there’s a killer on the loose, but mostly it’s just John looking lost and everyone else speaking in unsubtitled Italian like they’re actively avoiding him.
Eventually, John chases a red-coated figure through a maze of palazzos and canals. Believing it to be his dead daughter, he follows—and is rewarded with a meat cleaver to the neck by what appears to be a homicidal Oompa Loompa. Roll credits.
Grief as Aesthetic
It’s clear Roeg had ambition here. He wanted to explore how grief distorts time, identity, and perception. The trouble is, you can’t explore those themes if your characters are blank canvases. John and Laura are reduced to husks. The film treats their pain as a mood board—shrouded alleys, shattered glass, silent gondoliers. Emotion is suggested through slow zooms and the occasional scream. But at no point do we really feel anything.
Watching Christie and Sutherland move through the narrative is like watching two emotionally repressed ghosts haunt their own lives. Sutherland, in particular, spends most of the film with the same expression one wears while trying to remember if they left the oven on.
Editing or Obfuscation?
Roeg’s use of disjointed editing is hailed as groundbreaking. And yes, it’s inventive. But too often, it comes across as a filmmaker screaming “I am doing something important!” at the top of his lungs. The infamous love scene—intercut with the couple getting dressed—is praised for its realism, but plays more like a pretentious montage of marital efficiency.
Roeg flashes forward, backward, and sideways until time feels like one of Venice’s narrow alleys: winding, confusing, and leading nowhere. By the end, all this temporal hopscotch builds up to… a twist you saw coming 45 minutes ago. He’s been seeing his own death the whole time. Isn’t that clever?
Well, no. Not when every other scene reminds you of it in big flashing metaphor. Dead child in red coat? Check. Premonitions? Check. Psychic woman screaming “danger”? Triple check. The movie isn’t subtle—it’s just slow.
The Death of Atmosphere
Venice is a natural horror setting. In the right hands, the crumbling architecture and shadowy canals become characters in themselves. But Roeg flattens it. Everything looks beige. Even the gondolas seem depressed. And while I understand the intent was to depict a decaying city in spiritual and literal decline, what we end up with is a film that’s so allergic to tension that even a surprise death by dwarf feels like an obligation rather than a climax.
There’s no rhythm to the scares. No build. The murder at the end, delivered by a silent, cleaver-wielding gremlin, feels less like a terrifying twist and more like an outtake from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
Gothic Soap Opera in Disguise
At its core, Don’t Look Now is a soap opera dipped in dry ice. Husband and wife grieve. They fail to connect. One becomes obsessed with rebuilding things (a church, their life). The other seeks comfort in strangers (psychics, wine). Add some supernatural seasoning, a blood-spattered finalé, and an over-reliance on the color red, and you have a film that thinks it’s about existential dread but mostly just twiddles its thumbs while waiting for something to happen.
It’s ironic that a movie called Don’t Look Now spends so much time asking us to do just that. Look. Look at this symbol. Look at this reflection. Look at this red coat, again. But don’t expect resolution. Or satisfaction. Or logic.
Final Verdict
I’ll grant it this: Don’t Look Now has ambition. It wants to be more than a horror movie. But in trying so hard to transcend its genre, it loses the very thing horror does best—connect emotionally through fear. There’s no catharsis here, no revelation. Just people drifting, occasionally startled by echoes of grief and bad weather.
For those who love atmospheric slow burns with enough academic analysis to fuel a thousand college essays, this might be your thing. For the rest of us? It’s a moody dirge that over-promises and under-delivers. The most shocking thing isn’t the ending—it’s that it takes two hours to get there.
Grade: C-
Don’t look now? Honestly, you might not want to look at all.
