Death in Venice
Nicholas Roeg's 1973 DON'T LOOK NOW may be one of the single best studio films produced during the great so-called Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-1977; it certainly is one of the most influential. Using Daphne du Maurier's brilliantly ambiguous and mysterious novella as its base, Roeg uses her ghost story to produce what is really a meditation on time and space and the way in which fiction (and particularly film) structure our epistemological awareness of them both. The primary setting is Venice during the off-season, where a wealthy couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), are recuperating from the loss of their small daughter who drowned months before on their English estate. John is working restoring a damaged sixteenth-century venetian church, while Laura is distracted by a mysterious pair of English sisters, one of whom is psychic and insists their dead daughter is trying to contact them to warn them of impending danger.

There's much more besides, and Roeg complicates matters by splintering our awareness of both physical space (by complex camera work that emphasizes reflections and disjuncture) and of time (by crosscutting future events with events taking place in diegetic time). When all this comes together, especially when John conducts a cat-and-mouse game through the labyrinthine venetian streets and alleyways looking for both his wife and for a figure in a red mackintosh that may be his dead daughter, the emphasis on filmic technique begins to go beyond mere academic exercises and to increase your sense of suspense and horror. Certain sequences have become true classics, most particularly the famous sequence of Sutherland and Christie having sex in their Venetian hotel crosscut with scenes of them dressing afterwards; everything is beautifully fractured and splintered. As with De Palma's films from the same period, horror and the uncanny are used as vehicles through which the director can show us how film disrupts all our spatio-temporal coordinates. The acting at times might seem to contemporary viewers over-the-top (particularly in the opening sequence when Sutherland fails to save his daughter from drowning and carries her muddied body into the home), but it wouldn't work if it weren't pitched at this level. Neither Sutherland nor Christie have ever been better than they are here, and they share a terrific rapport.

Magnificent atmosphere, but the climax is a problem
Devastated by the death of their young daughter, an architect and his wife (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) spend some time in Venice, where the wife becomes convinced that a pair of sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania) has the psychic ability to contact the dead girl. The husband, however, tries to remain coolly rational about the situation, even as evidence mounts that he may have the gift himself. It all culminates in a startling conclusion.

I find I have to evaluate this film on two levels. First, there is no movie that projects an atmosphere of palpable dread and uneasiness more successfully. Every moment seems fraught with mystery and impending doom; we never feel safe in this picture. It is the payoff to the magnificent build-up where the film falls flat. The final revelation is a crushing disappointment, as it does not follow from anything that has gone before. The film is otherwise so masterful that I cannot bring myself to give it a poor review.

Slow.....
It's bad, when about halfway through the movie, I wanted it to end. I don't mind a slow movie if it leads up to something incredible. The ending was NOT scary, and it was so anti-climatic that I was expecting more. THIS IS IT????

Positives:

Some good suspense, which seemingly had nothing to do with the story..
Julie Christie naked

I'm not a fan of gore or anythign like that, I really do like a good suspenseful movie. This one just does not deliver.

Don't Look Back DVD. Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie
Although this film came out a while ago, at last I am pleased to be able to get this on DVD. By todays film standards, it is a little dated, and not really a horror story, more a psychological thriller. It is still a great Daphne du Maurier story based in Venice. I'm not going to write the story line here, but just wanted to recommend that if you haven't seen it before, it really is worth watching.

Creepy, but not til the end...
This brittish horror movie is a back shelf classic, because it isn't well known. Donald Sutherland is the only person I reconized in this movie. The movie focuses around a family. They are haunted by guilt after there daughter accidently drowns. Trying to heal there minds, Donald Sutherland's characters and wife travel to italy where he is doing a construction job. There are these 2 strange women who claim to be mediums, and know about the accident. There are plenty of forboding, omen's of death bestowed upon the characters. Worse of all Donald Sutherlands character keeps seeing his dead daughter in her shiney red raincoat, is she real? or just a hallucination? The plot points to something much more sinster, and evil lerking in the streets, and stalking him. VERY VERY FREAKY ENDING...