Review of Don't Look Now (1936) by Martin D — 24 Mar 2011

A young girl in a red coat plays by a pond in the gray English winter. Her young brother plays nearby while their parents work inside. Suddenly a bloodred stain forms on John Baxter's (Donald Sutherland.

) slide of a church window and he runs outside just before his son calls. He is too late--his daughter has drowned. His wife, Laura (Julie Christie), screams, melding into the screech of a drill renovating a church in Venice some time later, where John and Laura have fled to work and move on. During lunch one afternoon, Laura meets two frumpy English sisters, one of whom is a blind psychic. She gives Laura a reading in which she explains that that she can see the Baxters' dead daughter, Christine. Impressed and excited, she requests a further meeting during which the sisters warn that John, whom they insist is blessed with second sight, is in grave danger. John has recurrent simple symbolic visions and has seen and chased a young girl in a red coat running through the backstreets of Venice. However, he dismisses ESP as manipulative mumbo jumbo and, when Laura turns up missing, fears that the sisters may be the murderers the police are seeking. Eerie and erotic, Nicolas Roeg's hallucinogenic DON?T LOOK NOW, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, suggests the mystical and ineffable through haunting visions of simultaneity and confusion.