DON'T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Reviewed: September 19th, 2002

Nicolas Roeg's kaleidoscope of doom is one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie (two of cinema's greatest) play spouses John and Laura Baxter, quietly grieving parents trying to put their young daughter's accidental death behind them. Having moved to Venice for awhile because of a job opportunity (as well as, we suspect, to put as much physical distance between daughter's place of death and living quarters as possible), Christie meets a blind psychic who claims to be able to communicate with her diseased child. I dare not spoil any more specifics, but suffice to say, evil shit hits the fan.

To merely call Roeg's filmmaking distinct is to understate -- he's a visionary. Often criticized for favoring visual and tonal bravado over narrative coherence, gun-in-the-first-act-must-go-off-in-the-third adherents can sleep soundly with the knowledge Don't Look Now is justly regarded as one of Roeg's most accessible films. The DVD casing bills the film as a "psychic thriller" -- and I'll be the first to admit that phrase is a major turnoff since ESP and other premonitory sundries generally don't interest me much -- but in the inimitable hands of Roeg, these sorts of generic elements are elevated to scary-as-fucking-hell cinematic poetry.

Roeg's astonishingly eerie imagining of Venice as a cold and decaying wasteland is the ideal backdrop for his "we're all pawns in a forlorn game of chess" themes. Everything feels off-kilter, often almost imperceptibly. Roeg finds potential horror in the most banal of places, and like a masterful orchestra pushing towards its final swell, Roeg meticulously builds Don't Look Now to a nearly intolerable level of dread.

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