An innovative psychological horror masterpiece that exemplifies the notion that the genre works best when humanity is at its core.
I can still vividly remember the first time I watched
Don’t Look Now. It was October 2013, during my final semester in college, and since both of my roommates were out of town for the weekend and I had full control of the television, I decided to have a 70’s horror marathon of random movies I’d heard about but never seen. I fired up Netflix – because this was back when Netflix was basically the only major movie streaming service so they had an impressively deep catalogue – and after a long day of blood-and-guts – because that was my favorite type of horror back then – this subtle, supernatural chiller about two parents haunted by the death of their young child ended up as the finale, and it changed my life immeasurably.
Don’t Look Now is brimming with the celebrated trademarks that made British avant-garde filmmaker
Nicolas Roeg so highly renowned by cinephiles and filmmakers throughout the world: thoughtful symbolism, surreal imagery, unconventional editing, painterly compositions, and a distinctly unique perspective of the human condition.
Before watching this movie, I graded my enjoyment of most horror films by body count and how creative the kills were (I really liked slasher movies), but Roeg’s trademark elements combined to create an experience I’d never really had with the genre before and cast an irreversible spell on me. For the first time I was really awakened to the painstaking and frankly underappreciated artistry that lies in the genre, as well as its ability to act as catharsis for feelings such as loss and grief.
In a previous write-up for
The Babadook I mentioned that horror often helps us to come face-to-face with these complex emotions by giving them a manifestation - such as the titular creature in
The Babadook - for the characters to interact with, and in that respect
Don’t Look Now hits on all fronts, as the protagonist John Baxter spends much of the film chasing after what may or may not be an apparition of his deceased daughter. Through the canals of Venice, even as he denies his own experiences, he seems to be chasing death itself.
One of the most fascinating things about Roeg’s films, as stated previously, is the editing. His films use montage to brilliant effect. And I’m not talking about the meaning that the word montage has gained over the years that we typically associate with 80s films where underdogs rigorously train before a big fight. I’m talking about the original meaning of
montage, created by Soviet filmmakers in the late 1920s (shoutout
Sergei Eisenstein and
Dziga Vertov), when they revolutionized the art of film editing. Their idea - which may seem basic now but it truly changed the grammar of film - was that filmmakers could take entirely separate images that individually have nothing to do with each other, and through the juxtaposition of these images, create complex meanings and emotions that otherwise would not be present. Roeg took this idea and ran wildly with it in his films; his specialty was cross-cutting and match-cutting between separate events to create a synchronistic symbolism, as if the events were metaphysically connected.
In
Don’t Look Now, Roeg masterfully applied these techniques to create an ever-building dread. No exposition is given, and nothing is even explicitly shown, but the editing gives the uncanny feeling that something deeply disturbing is unfolding. A little girl is playing by a pond; a pack of cigarettes is tossed with a ball; a glass of water is knocked over onto a photograph as the ball lands in the pond; the ball spins slowly and the photograph appears to bleed; a disquieting look of terror crosses John Baxter’s face. (Also props to the actual editor
Graeme Clifford. It may sound like I’m giving too much credit to Roeg for a job that wasn’t necessarily his, but this idiosyncratic editing is present in literally every film I’ve seen of his which is why I give him the largest credit. I believe much of the editing throughout his filmography came from his singular artistic vision for his films, and his editors were the paintbrushes with which he accomplished it.)
The final reason why
Don’t Look Now is so meaningful to me is that it was my introduction to the
Criterion Collection, a film distributor that would legitimately change my life and open me up to an entirely new pantheon of films and filmmakers that, even with an education in film theory, I was completely unaware of. I’d seen Criterion Collection movies in the past without knowing it, but it was buying a physical copy of this movie a year-and-a-half later in the spring of 2015 that I became consciously aware of them, as the only copy of
Don’t Look Now I could find was through Criterion. I remember being so impressed by the detailed packaging, enlightening bonus content, and even just the invigoratingly impassioned way that the back cover described the film, that I immediately looked up what these people were all about, and subsequently spent weeks studying their extensive catalog of art-house, classic, and international films.
My crossing with Don’t Look Now on that fateful Saturday in October would shake my world in beautifully unexpected ways, and it still stands today as one of the films that as an overly-passionate movie-obsessed wackadoo I find myself most deeply indebted to.
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