Don't Look Now

13/12/2025

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Don’t Look Now is a horror film, it has absorbed the intricacies of form and arrived at the complexity of the aesthetic. Or, put another way, it is a film about horror rather than a horror film, and uses cinematic innovations practised throughout the sixties to unsettle the viewer without feeling obliged to follow horror tropes. In the trope, the form is dictated by the generic, exemplified in jump scares and figures casting shadows, villainous point-of-view shots prowling corridors, and music cutting out a moment before a monster appears before our eyes. Nic Roeg’s film has frightening scenes and a monster of sorts, but its ambiguous relationship with genre is partly because of its assertive relationship with editing. Critic Pauline Kael understood something of this ambivalence as she warily respected and simultaneously dismissed the film, noting Roeg “employs fast, almost subliminal imagery, and his entire splintering style affects one subliminally.” But she also reckoned that Roeg turns the supporting characters into figures “exploited for sinister effects.” Most significantly, however, she sees the influence of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges — and the “controlled, systematic way in which Borges turns life into a mystical, malevolent nightmare.” (Reeling). Roeg had used Borges’s face at the end of his and Donald Camell’s earlier Performance, and if that was a gangster film turned inside out by the directors’ fractured visuals, Don’t Look Now is a horror film that goes beyond the horror of representation to a horror harder to locate and seems present beneath the punctuated terrors usually practised in the genre.
     In the first instance, this is a film about a grieving couple: Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play John and Laura Baxter, in Venice, trying to recover from the death of their young daughter. He is there fixing eroding mosaics, while Laura becomes fascinated by a couple of elderly Scottish ladies in the city who reckon John has second sight, and who tell Laura her daughter is safe in the beyond. But of course, if Roeg were only concerned with the couple’s recovery, little would be made of John’s premonitions, nor the Scottish women and their beliefs. Yet through his editing strategies, Roeg wants the viewer to recognise the premonitory as a formal realisation much greater than usual. It is common enough for a filmmaker to leave us anticipating what will happen little or much later in a film, and we even have a term for it: foreshadowing. Yet we can perhaps usefully distinguish between foreshadowing and forewarning, with the former the delayed narrative detail that waits for a later pay-off: the glasses in the garden fish pond in Chinatown; the dog in the flowerbed in Rear Window, the line in Body Heat when Kathleen Turner says to William Hurt — “you’re not too smart are you…I like that in man.” We can distinguish further: often, when commentators give examples of foreshadowing,they are speaking of the symbolic over the narrative. Whether it is the Xs viewed in The Departed in scenes that propose a character will die, or the oranges in The Godfather, where many critics have noted there’s always an orange, or several oranges, next to someone who will be murdered at a later point. These are signs we read, but not narrative details we comprehend. If those oranges had been spiced with poison earlier in the film, and later someone picked one up, we would anticipate their demise. Steven Spielberg does exactly this with the poison dates in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so does 1939's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Will Indiana Jones eat them? Will Sir Henry drink the poisoned beverage?
    Part of Roeg’s achievement is to dissolve these categories and generate in the viewer less a knowing relationship with its various modes of foreshadowing and forewarning, than an uncanny awareness that perhaps the world can be understood less rationally, more suggestively. And so to the opening scene, and a great example of forewarning, one that catalyses the film as Roeg shows us the Baxters' daughter drowning in a pond in their vast garden. John is looking at a slide showing a red, blurry, possible figure on the right-hand side of the image, and it resembles the figure in red, one in the centre of the church mosaic window he is looking at on the slide. The film cuts back to John looking at it, but as though thinking something else, and then shows him looking at Laura as the film cuts to her, after we have seen her in the background sitting by the fire. She is wondering why, if the world is round, a frozen pond is  flat. The film cuts back and forth and then shows John looking closely at the slide, and we see again the red figure, which resembles the daughter, Christine, that we see in the next shot, wearing a red raincoat, seen upside down reflected in the pond she will soon drown in. The film has match-cut between the figure in the slide and Christine. Shortly afterwards, her brother appears, on a bike, and the film cuts between Christine breaking ice as she walks over a semi-frozen puddle, and her brother cycling over a pane of glass that cracks under the wheel. The boy falls off his bike, and John looks up as if he has seen the fall, but he clearly hasn’t, and then shows Laura making a hand gesture to her mouth that is almost identical to one in the next shot offered by Christine. There are further match cuts in the sequence that go far beyond their usually isolated examples - like the cut when a match is blown out and turns into a rising sun in Lawrence of Arabia; the bone that turns into a spaceship in  2001; Marion Crane's eye and the water draining down the plug hole in Psycho. These are graphic matches, and just one of the types used in this opening sequence in Don’t Look Now. We also have movement on action cuts as behaviour is almost identical across the shots (as we have seen with Laura and Christine), and at the end of the sequence, when Laura sees her daughter’s body and lets out a scream. The next shot shows someone drilling as the film audio matches the scream with the sound of the drill. John and Laura are now in Venice; time has passed. They will try to recover as best they can.
        Roeg combines graphic matching, audio matching and matches on movement all the better to unsettle, which is why we’ve invoked the uncanny: the untoward, the hard to place. The examples we have given above from Lawrence of Arabia, 2001 and Psycho are canny examples — clever usage that makes us aware of tropes but not disturbed by them. Roeg wants that disturbance. In an interview with Tom Milne, Milne mentions a shot in Don't Look Now and notes that it wasn’t a Hitchcockian trick and Roeg says he “wanted it to be bizarre but  stemming from something that was totally natural and ordinary for them  [the characters] to do…” (Sight and Sound) This needn’t be Roeg disparaging Hitchcock, just well aware that their sensibilities are distinct — that Hitchcock, despite the surrealist dream sequence by Salvador Dali and the surrealism critics have found in Vertigo, including Peter Matthews in Sight and Sound and John Conomos in Senses of Cinema, was chiefly a rationalist. This is evident in the different approaches the filmmakers have taken towards the same writer: Daphne du Maurier. Hitchcock adapted du Maurier on three occasions: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and The Birds. Roeg just once with Don’t Look Now. Hitchcock in The Birds, for example, is happy with the causally unexplained, but this is as a general premise over a constant inexplicable mystery. Hitchcock’s McGuffin (the detail that sets the plot in motion) needn’t be known, nor sometimes the inverted McGuffin (where the conclusion can elide a detail because the plot is complete). But the coordinates thereafter or preceding them, are usually offered logically. For example, in Vertigo, we don’t know how James Stewart’s Scottie survives the rooftop incident that kills another man; we just know that he does, and he suffers acrophobia after it. In North by Northwest, Hitchcock cuts between what looks like almost certain death for Eve Kendall, only for Roger O Thornhill to yank her up on the upper bank of a train cabin. Hitchcock doesn't care to show us Eve surviving because this isn’t what the story is about. In one film, a foreshortened cliffhanging scene premises the film; in the other, it concludes it, and Hitchcock insists that in each instance these moments aren’t inexplicable - they are unimportant. They function outside the logical coordinates of the film because they aren’t deemed significant enough in themselves to be incorporated into the dramatic experience. There is nothing supernatural about them. What usually matters to Hitchcock is that we practise our logical faculties in working out the plot, while in Roeg’s films, the emphasis rests on the director working on our susceptibilities.
           We can think here for a moment about the difference between a literary editor and a film editor. The literary editor will usually correct and occasionally reshape material, evident in Alex Clark noting when he feels in the work editing's general absence: “Why didn't a red pen mark the hackneyed phrase, or the stock character, or the creaky dialogue?” (Guardian) The idea is that the work requires a little tidying up, some clarification, and the removal of some deadwood. But, in film, editing carries much more sensuous connotations, and has far more terms to describe it. There are close-ups and medium shots, long shots and establishing shots; jump cuts and parallel montage, reaction shots and indeed, of course, the various match cuts. Many of these can be used invisibly, and let’s not pretend that writers don’t have a few equivalents. Hitchcock may have mastered the cliffhanger as Scottie hangs off a building and Eve off a mountain, but the term's origins come from a Thomas Hardy novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes. Hardy leaves a character hanging off a cliff and then moves on to the next chapter before returning to the incident. In film terms, this would be offered in a crosscut (parallel montage), where the sensuous aspect would likely be more pronounced. Hardy’s scene is brilliantly done, but cinema seems especially adept at such moments, as the various editing techniques can be brought into play. The film can crosscut to the rescue mission and back to the person hanging there. It can show people, looking on below, and can move between the face of the person hanging on for their life, while cutting back to their fingers struggling to retain their grip. These can all be offered in fictional form, but it would still be closer to a demonstration than a dramatisation. Film seems the natural home for such moments.
     Yet usually in film, they are still deployed all the better to leave us aware of what is going on and how linked the various pieces of footage happen to be. In Don’t Look Now, Roeg’s use of uncanny match cuts, surprising cross cuts and the briefest of flashbacks can give to a sequence far greater sensuous elaboration (to use Susan Sontag’s term in ‘The Imagination of Disaster’) than in most films, let alone in literature. We can see this in the ending. John Baxter may not believe in second sight, but second sight believes in him. Seeing a small figure wearing a red duffel coat that resembles his daughter peripherally, he gives chase. Roeg shows us the tiny figure upside down in the canal, and then shows us the moment from the beginning where we saw the daughter reflected in the pond. Throughout the sequence, wintry Venice is in fog, and while this is a common trope in Gothic horror, Roeg uses it to create a world where perception is weak. Also, while in a typical chase sequence, the potential victim is chased by the murderer; here, it is John Baxter who stalks the person who will kill him. When his wife starts chasing him, chasing the small figure, it contains the horrible irony that though Laura has no premonitory gift, while John doesn’t believe in such nonsense, though he possesses it, she accepts he is in danger, while John does not. Throughout the sequence, Roeg hints at the symbolically foreshadowed through the presence of red, which is as conspicuously troublesome as the oranges in The Godfather.  The film cuts away to a priest and his red candle; Laura’s boots are red, and so are boats in the canal. This is symbolic foreshadowing as spiritual forewarning, and we become increasingly aware that John will not find his daughter. He will instead be doomed to join her, as the figure turns out to be a dwarf who plunges a large knife into John’s neck after the film cuts back to John’s slide and what looks like possibly the back of a person in it, namely this small figure. He is dead because he sees the world as rational. Roeg proposes in his form that time may be playing tricks on us; that John can see into the future but doesn’t know it or won't admit it, while film editing can help us see the film’s narrative future through the forewarnings and the narrative and symbolic foreshadowings. It makes the film horribly uncanny as Roeg uses the myriad possibilities in film editing to elicit a horror more surreptitious and terrifying than usual.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Don't Look Now

Don’t Look Now is a horror film, it has absorbed the intricacies of form and arrived at the complexity of the aesthetic. Or, put another way, it is a film about horror rather than a horror film, and uses cinematic innovations practised throughout the sixties to unsettle the viewer without feeling obliged to follow horror tropes. In the trope, the form is dictated by the generic, exemplified in jump scares and figures casting shadows, villainous point-of-view shots prowling corridors, and music cutting out a moment before a monster appears before our eyes. Nic Roeg’s film has frightening scenes and a monster of sorts, but its ambiguous relationship with genre is partly because of its assertive relationship with editing. Critic Pauline Kael understood something of this ambivalence as she warily respected and simultaneously dismissed the film, noting Roeg “employs fast, almost subliminal imagery, and his entire splintering style affects one subliminally.” But she also reckoned that Roeg turns the supporting characters into figures “exploited for sinister effects.” Most significantly, however, she sees the influence of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges — and the “controlled, systematic way in which Borges turns life into a mystical, malevolent nightmare.” (Reeling). Roeg had used Borges’s face at the end of his and Donald Camell’s earlier Performance, and if that was a gangster film turned inside out by the directors’ fractured visuals, Don’t Look Now is a horror film that goes beyond the horror of representation to a horror harder to locate and seems present beneath the punctuated terrors usually practised in the genre.
     In the first instance, this is a film about a grieving couple: Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play John and Laura Baxter, in Venice, trying to recover from the death of their young daughter. He is there fixing eroding mosaics, while Laura becomes fascinated by a couple of elderly Scottish ladies in the city who reckon John has second sight, and who tell Laura her daughter is safe in the beyond. But of course, if Roeg were only concerned with the couple’s recovery, little would be made of John’s premonitions, nor the Scottish women and their beliefs. Yet through his editing strategies, Roeg wants the viewer to recognise the premonitory as a formal realisation much greater than usual. It is common enough for a filmmaker to leave us anticipating what will happen little or much later in a film, and we even have a term for it: foreshadowing. Yet we can perhaps usefully distinguish between foreshadowing and forewarning, with the former the delayed narrative detail that waits for a later pay-off: the glasses in the garden fish pond in Chinatown; the dog in the flowerbed in Rear Window, the line in Body Heat when Kathleen Turner says to William Hurt — “you’re not too smart are you…I like that in man.” We can distinguish further: often, when commentators give examples of foreshadowing,they are speaking of the symbolic over the narrative. Whether it is the Xs viewed in The Departed in scenes that propose a character will die, or the oranges in The Godfather, where many critics have noted there’s always an orange, or several oranges, next to someone who will be murdered at a later point. These are signs we read, but not narrative details we comprehend. If those oranges had been spiced with poison earlier in the film, and later someone picked one up, we would anticipate their demise. Steven Spielberg does exactly this with the poison dates in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so does 1939's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Will Indiana Jones eat them? Will Sir Henry drink the poisoned beverage?
    Part of Roeg’s achievement is to dissolve these categories and generate in the viewer less a knowing relationship with its various modes of foreshadowing and forewarning, than an uncanny awareness that perhaps the world can be understood less rationally, more suggestively. And so to the opening scene, and a great example of forewarning, one that catalyses the film as Roeg shows us the Baxters' daughter drowning in a pond in their vast garden. John is looking at a slide showing a red, blurry, possible figure on the right-hand side of the image, and it resembles the figure in red, one in the centre of the church mosaic window he is looking at on the slide. The film cuts back to John looking at it, but as though thinking something else, and then shows him looking at Laura as the film cuts to her, after we have seen her in the background sitting by the fire. She is wondering why, if the world is round, a frozen pond is  flat. The film cuts back and forth and then shows John looking closely at the slide, and we see again the red figure, which resembles the daughter, Christine, that we see in the next shot, wearing a red raincoat, seen upside down reflected in the pond she will soon drown in. The film has match-cut between the figure in the slide and Christine. Shortly afterwards, her brother appears, on a bike, and the film cuts between Christine breaking ice as she walks over a semi-frozen puddle, and her brother cycling over a pane of glass that cracks under the wheel. The boy falls off his bike, and John looks up as if he has seen the fall, but he clearly hasn’t, and then shows Laura making a hand gesture to her mouth that is almost identical to one in the next shot offered by Christine. There are further match cuts in the sequence that go far beyond their usually isolated examples - like the cut when a match is blown out and turns into a rising sun in Lawrence of Arabia; the bone that turns into a spaceship in  2001; Marion Crane's eye and the water draining down the plug hole in Psycho. These are graphic matches, and just one of the types used in this opening sequence in Don’t Look Now. We also have movement on action cuts as behaviour is almost identical across the shots (as we have seen with Laura and Christine), and at the end of the sequence, when Laura sees her daughter’s body and lets out a scream. The next shot shows someone drilling as the film audio matches the scream with the sound of the drill. John and Laura are now in Venice; time has passed. They will try to recover as best they can.
        Roeg combines graphic matching, audio matching and matches on movement all the better to unsettle, which is why we’ve invoked the uncanny: the untoward, the hard to place. The examples we have given above from Lawrence of Arabia, 2001 and Psycho are canny examples — clever usage that makes us aware of tropes but not disturbed by them. Roeg wants that disturbance. In an interview with Tom Milne, Milne mentions a shot in Don't Look Now and notes that it wasn’t a Hitchcockian trick and Roeg says he “wanted it to be bizarre but  stemming from something that was totally natural and ordinary for them  [the characters] to do…” (Sight and Sound) This needn’t be Roeg disparaging Hitchcock, just well aware that their sensibilities are distinct — that Hitchcock, despite the surrealist dream sequence by Salvador Dali and the surrealism critics have found in Vertigo, including Peter Matthews in Sight and Sound and John Conomos in Senses of Cinema, was chiefly a rationalist. This is evident in the different approaches the filmmakers have taken towards the same writer: Daphne du Maurier. Hitchcock adapted du Maurier on three occasions: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and The Birds. Roeg just once with Don’t Look Now. Hitchcock in The Birds, for example, is happy with the causally unexplained, but this is as a general premise over a constant inexplicable mystery. Hitchcock’s McGuffin (the detail that sets the plot in motion) needn’t be known, nor sometimes the inverted McGuffin (where the conclusion can elide a detail because the plot is complete). But the coordinates thereafter or preceding them, are usually offered logically. For example, in Vertigo, we don’t know how James Stewart’s Scottie survives the rooftop incident that kills another man; we just know that he does, and he suffers acrophobia after it. In North by Northwest, Hitchcock cuts between what looks like almost certain death for Eve Kendall, only for Roger O Thornhill to yank her up on the upper bank of a train cabin. Hitchcock doesn't care to show us Eve surviving because this isn’t what the story is about. In one film, a foreshortened cliffhanging scene premises the film; in the other, it concludes it, and Hitchcock insists that in each instance these moments aren’t inexplicable - they are unimportant. They function outside the logical coordinates of the film because they aren’t deemed significant enough in themselves to be incorporated into the dramatic experience. There is nothing supernatural about them. What usually matters to Hitchcock is that we practise our logical faculties in working out the plot, while in Roeg’s films, the emphasis rests on the director working on our susceptibilities.
           We can think here for a moment about the difference between a literary editor and a film editor. The literary editor will usually correct and occasionally reshape material, evident in Alex Clark noting when he feels in the work editing's general absence: “Why didn't a red pen mark the hackneyed phrase, or the stock character, or the creaky dialogue?” (Guardian) The idea is that the work requires a little tidying up, some clarification, and the removal of some deadwood. But, in film, editing carries much more sensuous connotations, and has far more terms to describe it. There are close-ups and medium shots, long shots and establishing shots; jump cuts and parallel montage, reaction shots and indeed, of course, the various match cuts. Many of these can be used invisibly, and let’s not pretend that writers don’t have a few equivalents. Hitchcock may have mastered the cliffhanger as Scottie hangs off a building and Eve off a mountain, but the term's origins come from a Thomas Hardy novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes. Hardy leaves a character hanging off a cliff and then moves on to the next chapter before returning to the incident. In film terms, this would be offered in a crosscut (parallel montage), where the sensuous aspect would likely be more pronounced. Hardy’s scene is brilliantly done, but cinema seems especially adept at such moments, as the various editing techniques can be brought into play. The film can crosscut to the rescue mission and back to the person hanging there. It can show people, looking on below, and can move between the face of the person hanging on for their life, while cutting back to their fingers struggling to retain their grip. These can all be offered in fictional form, but it would still be closer to a demonstration than a dramatisation. Film seems the natural home for such moments.
     Yet usually in film, they are still deployed all the better to leave us aware of what is going on and how linked the various pieces of footage happen to be. In Don’t Look Now, Roeg’s use of uncanny match cuts, surprising cross cuts and the briefest of flashbacks can give to a sequence far greater sensuous elaboration (to use Susan Sontag’s term in ‘The Imagination of Disaster’) than in most films, let alone in literature. We can see this in the ending. John Baxter may not believe in second sight, but second sight believes in him. Seeing a small figure wearing a red duffel coat that resembles his daughter peripherally, he gives chase. Roeg shows us the tiny figure upside down in the canal, and then shows us the moment from the beginning where we saw the daughter reflected in the pond. Throughout the sequence, wintry Venice is in fog, and while this is a common trope in Gothic horror, Roeg uses it to create a world where perception is weak. Also, while in a typical chase sequence, the potential victim is chased by the murderer; here, it is John Baxter who stalks the person who will kill him. When his wife starts chasing him, chasing the small figure, it contains the horrible irony that though Laura has no premonitory gift, while John doesn’t believe in such nonsense, though he possesses it, she accepts he is in danger, while John does not. Throughout the sequence, Roeg hints at the symbolically foreshadowed through the presence of red, which is as conspicuously troublesome as the oranges in The Godfather.  The film cuts away to a priest and his red candle; Laura’s boots are red, and so are boats in the canal. This is symbolic foreshadowing as spiritual forewarning, and we become increasingly aware that John will not find his daughter. He will instead be doomed to join her, as the figure turns out to be a dwarf who plunges a large knife into John’s neck after the film cuts back to John’s slide and what looks like possibly the back of a person in it, namely this small figure. He is dead because he sees the world as rational. Roeg proposes in his form that time may be playing tricks on us; that John can see into the future but doesn’t know it or won't admit it, while film editing can help us see the film’s narrative future through the forewarnings and the narrative and symbolic foreshadowings. It makes the film horribly uncanny as Roeg uses the myriad possibilities in film editing to elicit a horror more surreptitious and terrifying than usual.

© Tony McKibbin