Don’t Look Now: A different kind of scary movie

MANILA, Philippines - It is during this time of November that many of us bring out the scary stuff of our imagination. For those who eschew the trick or treats, the cemetery visits or out-of-town trips, there is the time-honored movie marathon of horror films for a proper fright. However, the visceral gore offered by vampires, werewolves, witches, warlocks, serial killers and axe murderers can be a bit of overkill. Thank goodness for Don’t Look Now, a classic supernatural thriller from the highly-talented but under-appreciated Nicolas Roeg.

The story revolves around the grief-stricken Baxters, John (given a convincingly nuanced performance by Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (played movingly by Julie Christie), whose young daughter Christine drowns in a pond on their English country estate.

Shortly after the unfortunate accident, husband and wife find themselves in Venice after John accepts a commission from a bishop (Massimo Serato) to restore an old dilapidated church. Before leaving for the City of Canals, they put their son John Jr. in a  boarding school.

It is at a restaurant where she and her husband were dining that Laura meets two old women, the sisters Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania).  In a rather creepy encounter in the powder room, Heather, who is blind, tells Laura that she is able to see her dead daughter, describing the coat the child was wearing at the time of her drowning. 

The unexpected — and disturbing — revelation physically affects the still-mourning Laura, who faints and needs to be taken to the hospital. There, she informs John of what Heather said. Her husband, worried more for her mental state, takes her at face value. Was Heather truly psychic, or were she and her sister running a con? 

A memorable scene that has Laura lighting a candle in church for her Christine succinctly captures the gap between a father’s denial and a mother’s inability to let go, and illustrates the discomfort of John at her desperate embrace of an occult connection to their dead child. 

Nevertheless, the curious episode of Laura with the sisters seems to have broken the veil of sadness that separated husband and wife. That very night, she and John have sex. The intensely passionate act is interestingly intercut with scenes of John and Laura casually dressing up the following morning, thus preventing, cinematically, the two from ever being in complete union — implying a deep melancholy or a permanent separation.  

The next evening, when they go out to dinner, they get lost and are briefly separated from each other. It is at this time that John first glimpses a child-like figure (Adelina Poerio) wearing a red coat, much like what his daughter was wearing when she died.

At a séance with the two sisters, Laura is warned by Christine that John is in danger and must get out of Venice. She informs her husband about this, which results in a quarrel. Later that night, they receive a call that their son got hurt in an accident. Laura leaves the very next morning for London. 

However, left on his own, John’s world in short order turns into a surreal dimension where prophecy and premonition intersect with reality, leading to his befuddlement.

At the church he is restoring, he gets into an accident that nearly costs him his life. The fall — though an aborted death — echoes the fall of his daughter into the pond, the fall of his wife from fainting at the restaurant during the initial meeting with the sisters, and the fall that hurts his son at boarding school. Even the bishop John is working with in the church restoration shares that he lost his father in a fall.

On the waterways, he spots his wife on a funeral barge accompanied by the two sisters. A confused John reports his missing wife to the police, worried that she could have been abducted.  But the story as related by John seems rather suspicious to police authorities, who are trying to solve the mystery of a serial killer on the loose. And while trying to make sense of his sightings — or perhaps visions — of his wife and her erstwhile companions, he again sees the child-like figure with the red coat.

There is a poignant scene of John picking up a naked doll out of a canal, recalling when, during the first few moments of the film, he gets his own daughter’s body from the pond. And, in context, a macabre one, too, when dead bodies are being fished out of briny Venetian channels. 

Eventually, he confirms that Laura was indeed in London, and makes peace with the sisters whom he placed in the embarrassing situation of being brought for questioning to the police station. After he leaves Heather’s hotel, he again espies the figure in red, and doggedly pursues it — alas, to disaster.

As wife, psychic and police try to catch up with him, John belatedly discovers, when he has cornered his mark in a deserted palazzo, that this was no wraith, nor waif, that he was running after, but the serial killer, who claims him as her next victim.   

Don’t Look Now is a different kind of scary movie because beyond just being another ghost story, or a serial killer mystery, it explores the psyche of people grieving the loss of a loved one. The film has an emotional gravitas that is lacking in the run-of-the-mill movies of the horror genre.  Indeed, the presence of the unfortunate Christine sets the mood and tone of the film, as she and the circumstances surrounding her death are a constant reference throughout the film’s haunting imagery. 

Stylish in its cinematograph, idiosyncratic in its fragmented editing and unusual in its scoring, Don’t Look Now builds up suspense gradually, resulting in a storytelling that is chilling and sinister in its subtlety. 

“Nothing is what it seems,” utters John Baxter in the film. And when the normal crosses over to the paranormal, and the irrational blends with the rational, it may just be a matter of life or death.

About the author:

A marketing and communications practitioner, it was as a schoolboy at Colegio San Agustin that C. Horatius Mosquera, 47, discovered his interest in writing, books, food and film. He received his A.B. and M.B.A. degrees from the Ateneo de Manila. His writing has received recognition in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature and the Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Awards.

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