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Don’t Look Now

— Has much in common with European cinema. Beautiful images and heavy symbolism but rather cold at its core.”

• Director: Nicolas Roeg
• United Kingdom, 1973
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Don’t Look Now is technically a horror movie, but it’s also a technical film, arty and aloof and not at all a genre standard. You could even see Meryl Streep playing the wife, but that would have made an already difficult film intolerable.

Roeg’s off-season Venice is cold and strangely alluring and he casts silence in a leading role. The nerves of the nervous become frayed by seemingly inocuous situations loaded with dread potential and queasy close-ups of minor characters, transforming them into grotesques.

At times Don’t Look Now can be irritating with its distant, dazed moodiness. Despite effective acting, this dispassionate viewpoint prevents us from sympathising with the protagonists John and Laura Baxter as they struggle to deal with the loss of their daughter. Ultimately the distance serves to lessen the impact of the plot’s climax, making viewing the film a chilly and unrewarding experience.