Critics reviews

Exquisitely designed, each scene is pierced with the color red—curtains, scarves, ink, boots, long johns on the line—connecting with the daughter’s red slicker, and the hooded figure scurrying through the Venice night.

For all its surface disorientation, Don’t Look Now is by the end fully unmysterious, reconciling the everyday and the uncanny in a way that locates reassurance and peace of mind even in violent, unfathomable tragedy.

Roeg makes brilliant use of Venice's architecture and design, rendering the city a fantastic, maze-like world. (The eerie, mood-enhancing score is by Pino Donaggio, who would go on to be Brian De Palma's regular composer.) The leads are superb, playing off each other brilliantly and sexily; the film's centerpiece is a complexly edited sex scene that aroused no small controversy upon first release.

I know viewers who find it slow, who chafe at the dialogue-free stretches and absence of chances to laugh, which means that it's become the kind of director's-movie treasured by cinephiles and formalists above all else. But couldn't go without its way of spooking you. Tense and ambiguous to the end, its suspense and entrapment hit the sweet spot, where it leaves just enough said and unsaid to be both lucid, coherent, and aimed directly at the subconscious.

Superimposing intricate, baroquely subliminal symbol-patterns and glazed, death-masque motifs on hoary gothic thriller conventions, it feels like a Hitchcock film that went missing in Venice and whose remains were dredged up by divers from the canals. Newly available in a gorgeous Blu-ray edition (including some bare-bones but agreeable making-of interviews), if there were an award for the eeriest, clammiest atmosphere ever committed to film, Don't Look Now would belong on the shortlist

Don't Look Now retains its power and mystery today thanks to Roeg's mastery of what Alfred Hitchcock famously called "pure cinema," manifest in his visual sleight of hand and above all in his refusal to be bound by the conventions of dialogue-driven narrative and simple chronology. All this has shaped a style that has justifiably come to be described as "Roegian.

The editing (not only of image, but intricately of sound) is pointedly showy to the extent that even casual viewers will notice its contradictorily fluid yet jagged dexterity. It's meant to be violating, because we're supposed to feel as if we're slightly apart from the story. The filmmakers forge an aura of hushed dread that's nearly unrivaled in cinema, painting the city as a chicly knotted Escher madhouse of labyrinthine curves and potentially dangerous inhabitants.

It isn't just the notorious sex scene that proves Sutherland is a capably desirable leading man in Don't Look Now. Throughout the film his character evinces an adoration for his wife that is remarkably authentic and immensely appealing—important since so much of the film consists of Sutherland searching for her in the echoing nighttime streets of Venice. Without this grounding, in fact, it's unlikely the film's horrific, bizarre final tragedy would register as devastatingly as it does.

Synchronistic editing style seems especially dazzling today, when every single art film eschews montage for mise-en-scène; Roeg and editor Graeme Clifford employ rhyming cuts that function almost like double-tracked vocals, deriving power from the sense of same-but-different.

Roeg uses Daphne Du Maurier's short story as a masterly procession of uncanny set-pieces, with the color red materializing variously as Poe's Masque of Death, a tiny Red Riding Hood figure scuttling in dark hallways, a blot spreading malevolently over a photograph... Arguably the subtlest giallo ever made, it's a film to heighten the senses.

Complete with drowned children, a blind seer, an intimidating clergyman, and an impressive gushing of blood (to say nothing of its surprisingly graphic and sentimental sex scene), Don't Look Now manipulates the conventions of the horror genre while it adds its own peculiar sense of foreboding.

Easily the most successful film adaptation of a Daphne Du Maurier story (sorry Hitch!), Don't Look Now is both a chilling horror film and a fascinating portrait of grief. The film's remarkable dreamlike textures evoke a present constantly slipping into memory.