Donʼt Look Now

Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is a 1973 British-Italian supernatural horror film built around grief, premonition and the uneasy business of trying to rebuild a life after a child’s death. Set largely in Venice, it follows married couple John and Laura Baxter as they arrive in the city for work and an attempt at recovery, only to be pulled into a web of sightings, warnings and dread. Its horror is not just in what may be stalking the Baxters, but in how Roeg turns bereavement, desire and uncertainty into a single, unstable emotional state. For viewers who want horror that is as much about atmosphere and psychological fracture as explicit menace, it remains a singular experience.

The Film File

• Original release year: 1973
• Director: Nicolas Roeg
• Credited writers: Allan Scott, Chris Bryant, based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier
• Principal cast: Julie Christie as Laura Baxter; Donald Sutherland as John Baxter; Hilary Mason as Heather; Clelia Matania as Wendy; Massimo Serato as Bishop Barbarrigo; Renato Scarpa as Inspector Longhi
• Approximate runtime of this version: 110 minutes
• Country or countries of production: United Kingdom, Italy
• Relevant horror subgenres: supernatural horror, psychological horror, gothic horror, grief horror

Behind the Screams

Don’t Look Now adapts Daphne du Maurier’s short story of the same name, originally published in 1970 and later collected in Not After Midnight. The film keeps the basic foundation, a couple visiting Venice after the loss of their daughter, but expands it into a more elaborate study of perception, memory and emotional disarray. Roeg was drawn to material that could sustain ambiguity, and the film’s structure reflects that interest: it refuses a straightforward march from setup to payoff, instead folding together fragments of domestic life, uncanny visions and states of mind.

The screenplay is credited to Allan Scott and Chris Bryant. The production also brought together several key collaborators who shaped the film’s identity, including cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond, editor Graeme Clifford and composer Pino Donaggio. The location work in Venice is not decorative background but a central creative choice, with the city’s winter light, waterlogged streets and labyrinthine architecture becoming part of the film’s unease. The production was a British-Italian collaboration, with filming in England and Venice contributing to the film’s cross-cultural texture.

One of the best-known elements of the film’s production history is its erotic scene between Sutherland and Christie, which drew controversy at the time. What matters artistically is not scandal for its own sake, but the way Roeg places intimacy and mourning in the same emotional register. The film’s adult content is not there as a detour from the horror; it is woven into the same unstable world of longing, vulnerability and foreboding. Contemporary and later accounts of the film repeatedly note that the editing and visual patterning were conceived to generate associations rather than simple chronology, and that Roeg wanted image and feeling to carry as much weight as plot. That is plainly visible in the finished film’s construction.

Into the Dark

John Baxter, a church restorer, and his wife Laura are still reeling from the accidental drowning death of their young daughter. When John accepts work in Venice, the move offers a practical reason to leave England, but it also places the couple in a city that feels strangely receptive to grief, omen and misreading. Laura becomes involved with two elderly sisters, one of whom claims psychic sight and insists that their daughter is trying to contact them. John, meanwhile, is more sceptical, though the city begins feeding his unease through small coincidences, elusive glimpses and a sense that he is being watched or led.

The film’s central conflict comes from the way its characters respond differently to loss. Laura wants connection, reassurance and signs. John wants order, professional focus and a way to keep moving. Roeg makes both reactions understandable, which gives the story emotional pressure rather than reducing it to a simple battle between belief and disbelief. As the Baxters drift through Venice, the film accumulates dread through hints rather than explanation, and the city itself starts to seem like a place where the past can intrude without warning.

What gives the story its particular force is the tension between the personal and the supernatural. Even before the film reaches its most notorious developments, it is about how people interpret fragments when they are desperate for meaning. John’s work on a church restoration is fittingly symbolic, since he is trying, in effect, to repair something that cannot be restored in any ordinary sense. The horror comes from how badly the film understands the limits of such repair, and how the characters’ attempts to make sense of events can pull them deeper into danger.

What Gets Under Your Skin

Don’t Look Now does not frighten through relentless attack or elaborate set-pieces. Its power lies in unease, in the way it turns grief into a condition that distorts time, space and judgement. Roeg’s storytelling is deliberately fractured, with scene transitions and visual echoes encouraging the viewer to connect moments in ways that feel intuitive rather than logical. That can make the film seem elusive on first viewing, but the technique serves its subject exactly: John and Laura are not living in a clean narrative of recovery, and the film refuses to pretend they are.

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are crucial to that effect. Their performances are emotionally open without becoming theatrical, and the film asks them to carry contradictory impulses at once: affection, exhaustion, sexual attraction, guilt and private despair. Christie’s Laura is especially important because she gives the film a route into hope, however fragile or uncertain that hope may be. Sutherland’s John, by contrast, is all surfaces of competence and control until the film gradually exposes how badly those surfaces hold. The casting gives the story a domestic credibility that makes the horror more disturbing, not less.

Visually, the film is remarkable for how it makes Venice feel less like a picturesque setting than a place of concealment and reflection. Water, glass, narrow alleys, mirrors and interior spaces all contribute to a sense that perception is repeatedly failing or being redirected. Roeg and Richmond do not merely photograph a beautiful city; they make it seem unstable, as if it were constantly offering a version of reality that might vanish a second later. Pino Donaggio’s score adds to that instability with music that is mournful, tender and uncanny rather than aggressively sensational. It is one of the reasons the film feels haunted even when nothing overtly supernatural is on screen.

The horror itself is notably indirect. There are moments of explicit menace, but the film’s most lasting discomfort comes from anticipation, implication and the possibility that a warning has been present all along. That approach can make the film feel slow to viewers expecting conventional shocks, yet the slowness is purposeful. It allows dread to accumulate around ordinary gestures and conversations, so that by the time the story tightens, the emotional stakes are already in place. The film is not interested in using fear as a series of isolated jolts; it treats fear as something that can seep into grief, intimacy and daily routine.

The Film’s Afterlife

Don’t Look Now was controversial on release, especially for its sexual frankness, but its reputation has only strengthened. It is now widely regarded as one of Roeg’s major works and a landmark in British horror, though it is a distinctly literary, psychological and stylistic one rather than a template for mainstream genre filmmaking. Its influence is easiest to see in later horror that treats editing, subjectivity and emotional damage as central to suspense. The film’s ending, in particular, has become one of the most discussed in horror cinema, but the film’s lasting importance is broader than a single shock: it helped define what supernatural horror could look like when it is filtered through grief, ambiguity and formal invention.