Don't Look Now
classified 15Please note: This was screened in July 2024
"The sad news of Donald Sutherland’s death brought to mind the varied magnificence of his screen presence and the range of films in which he breathed life into the characters such as Klute, M*A*S*H and Invasion of The Body Snatchers. But perhaps his most powerfully inhabited is as the grieving father in Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now." Mark Cosgrove, Cinema Curator
Adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier short story, Don’t Look Now sees Nic Roeg's growing interest in the otherworldly, the mysterious and coincidence as well as his increasing ability to suspend plot and narrative through the choreography of editing.
The opening sequence is perhaps the purest form of Roeg's visual storytelling sensibility. He lays out all the emotional and thematic elements of the film in a tour de force of cinematic expression with powerful emotional impact - the rest of the film resonating with the loss of the child and grief of the parents played to wrenched emotional perfection by Sutherland and Julie Christie.
Don't Look Now holds in sublime balance the tenderness of a mature relationship - the celebrated love scene its emotional heart - stretched by the growing unease of a death foretold. An out of season Venice echoes the film itself: haunting and haunted, mysterious and timeless.