Don’t Look Now

Wednesday 4 March at 7.30pm

Nicolas Roeg | UK | 1973 | 110 mins | M violence & sex scenes

Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland portray Laura and John Baxter, a married couple who travel to Venice following the recent accidental death of their daughter.

“Based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story, Don’t Look Now opens with the death of a child, but the tragedy is that of her parents, John and Laura. Relocating from the English countryside to wintry Venice, where John is restoring artwork in a church, the couple try in their different ways to recover from the loss. There is tension between them, as she falls in with two peculiar sisters—one a blind clairvoyant—and he catches glimpses of a figure who resembles his dead daughter. Director Nicolas Roeg composes an uncanny masterpiece of colour (notably red) and fractured editing, expressing the characters’ psychology and experience to stunning effect. The sex and death scenes have seldom been matched.” – Sight & Sound

“Time collapses in Don’t Look Now. The past and future are folded into the present. Anyone who has seen Roeg’s work from this peak period of his career will recognize his intuitive, semi-experimental editing and how much it pushed the boundaries of commercial cinema. Yet there’s something special about the way certain patterns and visual motifs keep cycling through this film, a reminder that grief can strike at any time for John and Laura, no matter how far they run from it.” – Scott Tobias, The Guardian