Nicholas Roeg, the innovative filmmaker who practically invented MTV style editing with his debut film Performance turned to the genre of horror for Don’t Look Now, his third feature. The film straddles a similar line between horror and haute drama to that of the likes of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, yet has a European sensibility and experiment attitude that delves much further than those previous two films.

Don’t Look Now opens with the death of a child. Charlotte drowns whilst out playing with her brother, while her parents work in their living room. Haunted with the grief of the event the parents, Laura and John Baxter (played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) leave the family home and follow John’s work to Venice. A chance (?) meeting with two elderly sisters begins a spiral of confusion, hallucination and nightmares, and brings with it a shadowy prophecy that scolds Julie but leaves John complacent. As the film builds to a disturbing climax we see the prophecy unravel, and with it so does the mental fabric of our protagonists.

One of your children has posed a curious question: if the world is round, why is a frozen lake flat? Laura Baxter.

Don’t Look Now is an incredibly stylish piece of cinema. Roag adopts many unconventional techniques (for the time) such as reversing the frame, or the expected frame in order to create something irreverent and off-kilter, rotates visual motifs such as the circles that open the film, and incorporates the use of colour to push the boundaries of expectation. The use of the colour red is especially prevalent, be it in the coat of the dead daughter, the heavy hues of the Venice surrounding or the dressage of the eventual killer. Of course this is all intentional, but compared to the cinema of the time it is incredibly bold, and actually very subtle. The shot of Charlotte running alongside the lake, with our view being of that of her reflection in the river is one of those moments in cinema that is pretty much eternal in terms of its connection with the medium. This scene is also a great example of the use of repetition within Don’t Look Now. The shot is recycled and incorporated into several later scenes, to convey the disintegrating state of John’s mind. As to is the use of the hooded red figure that is prevalent throughout. It starts out in the feature as a figure in one of the photographs of the church that John is heading the renovations of, yet comes into fruition as the disguise of the killer that has underlined the film throughout. The use of colour to manipulate the image is both vivid and eerie, and incredibly effective at provoking the audience, which is technically the role of the horror feature. As mentioned above, patterns and visual motifs are a huge part of the visual style of Don’t Look Now. Circles and circular actions are present often, with the scene in which John falls from the roof of the church being a prominent display of such motifs; prior to his fall there is an overlaid shot of one of the two elderly sisters cackling away, as if to parlay his immediate future, followed by an incredibly voracious spinning motion from the camera as he is falling. The look on the face of the worker attempting to save him is astonishing.

The skill of police artists is to make the living appear dead. Inspector Longhi.

The use of sound in Don’t Look Now is incredibly effective and important. Our first insight into just how pivotal its use will be comes very early on in the film, as Laura’s shriek is combined with the sound of a drill to create one complete edit which covers time, distance and mental passing. While segments of the time that has spanned between the two cuts are momentarily covered in flashbacks (silent or diegetic sound accompanied shots of  the Baxter’s leaving their home, to name but one such moment), for the most part this section of the overarching story is left unexplained, with it being a testament to the narrative drivers that it still holds together. A lot of the more outlandish scares in Don’t Look Now come from moments heavily reliant on sound, for example Laura’s fall in the restaurant, which again echoes the use of “falling” as a motif. As the film is largely rather quiet these moments of noise are all the more effective, which in turn leads onto my next point. The lack of sound, and especially diegetic music in the opening scenes makes the level of emotional involvement all the more impressive. The sequences involving the death of Charlotte prove nigh on impossible to watch, such was the voracity of the grief on screen. That such a scene doesn’t rely on manipulative music in order to convey itself to the viewer is an outstanding display of confidence on the behalf of Roeg, and a fruitful artistic decision to boot.

The influence of Don’t Look Now can be seen far and wide, with the revelation of the killer of the piece being a bona-fide, Simpson’s parodied part of popular culture. The famous sex scene has been the source of decades worth of speculation and rumour, and too has made it into the cannon of popular culture. The core performances are second to none, with Sutherland especially on form in a role that closely relates to his work in Alex in Wonderland and Klute, roles which were very much different to his work in the late 1960′s (Practically light relief turns in Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen and M.A.S.H amongst others) I must confess to never having actually seen Don’t Look Now prior to this screening, which itself was as a prep of sorts for this weekends viewing of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, a film which is said to be heavily reminiscent of Roeg’s piece, and while I didnt’ enjoy it as much as expected, it was an interesting viewing of a film that will no doubt linger.