31 Nights o' Horror Selections #3: DON'T LOOK NOW @ 50

After losing their daughter Christine in an accident, the Baxters avoid grief by throwing themselves into their careers. They decamp to Venice where John is overseeing the restoration of a church. One day, John and Laura are lunching at a restaurant when they spy two old women looking over to the Baxters' table. When one of the women needs assistance, Laura gets up and helps out. One of the women is blind and blurts out that she "saw" young Christine at their table, laughing along with the conversation. Laura freaks out and faints back at the table. Back at their hotel, she tells John what happened which disturbs him. Laura's uncharacteristic singsong joy at hearing that the spirit of Christine was lingering on earth is going to have some serious effects.

Nicholas Roeg's film of Daphne Du Maurier's novel was written by Allen Scott and Chris Bryant who modernised the setting and kept sight of the theme of grief firmly in the centre. Without this, the director's signature time shifts and stream of consciousness montages might have ended up in a mess. But the discipline of insisting on this core allows strange moments on screen to successfully beg our patience. When John sees a funeral barge pass his ferry on the canals, with Laura in mourning black standing on deck, his confusion over events and rage over the influence of the weird sisters on his wife. His grip on events, already loosening, might well have caused this hallucination. Soon enough, we'll know the truth of it. Roeg isn't always so fortunate with his writers but here it works. 

And it's helped in industrial quantities by its location. Off-season Venice is a large, grey and sinister place where the windows are shuttered and the footpaths which could trip you into lethally cold water as easily as you taking the next step. The assignment with the church is going south after a sloppy accident on the site and a serial killer is lurking in the many shadows of the city. Then, John starts seeing Christine or someone like her, in the red raincoat we've only seen her in. The figure darts over bridges, slips into alleys and can seemingly vanish at will. Hell of a way to defy grief through toil.

When I first saw this film it was on an old black and white tv in my undergrad house. As a film student eager to touch cinema that waived convention, I saw its stretching pace and abstractions as attractive. Then came the infamous ending (no spoilers here, sorry) when it rapidly turns into a very conventional horror film for a single scene before landing more softly back on the path where it started. We couldn't shut up about it at Uni. I got it out on VHS over the Christmas break and saw it in colour (finally getting the red raincoat motif) and its standing increased with me.

Cut to decades later and I show it to a couple of friends who hadn't seen it and disaster struck. They were tired and unwilling to get dragged through such a attention defying movie. I was surprised to find that like yawning, this boredom spread to me, too. I apologised for the choice. One of them begged off and retired for the night. The other insisted we see it through. It was far too late, then. The film had stodged out to bland stultification, not to recover.

A decade after that, I saw it on a retail site in 4K in steelbook packaging at a great price and thought why not. It sat lodged in the shelf for well over a year until it came up as an anniversary film, Mark Kermode dedicated an episode of his Screen Shots podcast to it and I was brought to October, seeking all the mostly unseen 4K physical media I had. This time, I just watched, let it flow over me, enjoyed the gloomy Venice and performances of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, including their notorious sex scene (which now comes across as a moment of happiness that marks the renewal of their intimacy after the death) and enjoyed the holy living b'crikey out of it.

Don't Look Now and even any Nicholas Roeg film, really, is not for everyone. It's glacial (but not tedious) and it is respectful to the gravity of its theme. The backwards/forwards time shifting can jolt at first but isn't hard to get used to. Mainly, though, the committed performances of the central couple in a parallel universe version of a city of carnival and gaiety which is smothering them like a giant grey blob bring us through. And as the tiny red dart that brings their grief back front and centre jut keeps flitting around in the shadows we hope that they can make some peace and that that peace will not be ugly.

Viewing notes: This triumphant viewing of Don't Look Now was done with Studio Canal's superb 4K presentation. It's a cheap rental from Google Play but is free on SBS on Demand (with ads).