Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17618 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-07-29
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, Italian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Don't Look Now was filmed in 1973 and based around a Daphne Du Maurier novel. Directed by Nicolas Roeg, it has lost none of its chill: like Kubrick's The Shining, its dazzling use of juxtaposition, colour, sound and editing make it a seductive experience in cinematic terror, whose aftershock lingers in daydreams and nightmares, filling you with uncertainty and dread even after its horrific climax. Donald Sutherland plays John Baxter, an architect, Julie Christie his wife: a well-to-do couple whose young daughter drowns while out playing. Cut to Venice, out of season, where the couple encounter a pair of sisters, one of whom claims psychic powers and to have communicated with their dead daughter. The subsequent plot is as labyrinthine as the back streets of the city itself, down which Baxter spots a diminutive and elusive red-coated figure akin to his daughter, before being drawn into an almost unbearable finale. Don't Look Now is a Gothic masterpiece, with its melange of gore, mystery, ecstasy, the supernatural and above all grief, while the city of Venice itself--which thanks to Roeg and his team seems to breathe like a dark, sinister living organism throughout the movie--deserves a credit in its own right. Not just a magnificent drama but an advanced feat of cinema. --David Stubbs

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
Nicolas Roeg's third film--after the brash PERFORMANCE (1970) and meditative WALKABOUT (1971)--is a haunting thriller that confirmed the director's status as a true visionary. Based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, DON'T LOOK NOW follows a grieving English couple to Venice, where the past continues to plague them. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are in mourning for their young daughter, who drowned tragically near their home. John takes a job in Venice so that the couple can leave the past behind, but, unfortunately, the past is not easily forgotten. While John begins to see unsettling visions of a young girl in a red coat running through the Venice streets, Laura learns from an elderly psychic that her husband is in grave danger. What follows is an eerie, erotic mystery that builds to a shockingly horrific climax. DON'T LOOK NOW is one of the most daring and influential motion pictures of the 1970s. From Pino Donaggio's atmospheric score to Graeme Clifford's elliptical editing (exemplified in the film's notorious sex scene), Roeg's film is a stylistic achievement. Sutherland and Christie are their typical phenomenal selves playing the bereaved, devastated couple.

Customer Reviews

Atmospheric and Brilliant, With a Chilling Twist Ending.....
Set against a dreary Venice backdrop (strange, as Venice is usually portrayed as a rather idyllic and peaceful place), this bleak horror film is overflowing with an eerie atmosphere which builds and builds to a raging climax. While featuring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a husband and wife who's young daughter Christine drowns, leaving them depressed and detached from each other. However, on this trip to Venice, Christie's character meets two elderly sisters (one of them blind) who claim to have powers and tell her they can see Christine. Christie's character then becomes adamant that Christine is still with her parents. Sutherland's character John is unconvinced, until he sees a small figure in the same sort of red mackintosh his daughter used to wear. Yet, there is a serial killer on the loose, and is John playing into their hands? There are many different confusing plot points which keep your mind thinking all the way through, and you are not guaranteed to 'get' this film the first time you watch it. However it should be watched just because of that shocker ending. Even if you know what is going to happen, it still packs one Hell of a punch. Five stars, indefinitely.

Death in Venice
"One of the best horror films ever made," proclaims the cover quote from The Times. And it is, but only in the way that A Clockwork Orange is a pretty shrewd teen angst drama, or Taxi Driver is the finest movie about public transport since Mutiny On The Buses. Don't Look Now is simply a great film, great because it defies categorization, because it has no precedent. For one thing, it's less a horror film than a ghost story. But where's the ghost? There is a haunting, to be sure, but it's the haunting of a couple, John and Laura Baxter, by the memory of their daughter's accidental drowning. They take a break in grimy, off-season Venice (hardly a shrewd move, it being a drowned city) where the John (Donald Sutherland) oversees some restoration work on a church while Laura (Julie Christie) is befriended by two elderly women who may or may not be clairvoyant and who may or may not offer her a chance to communicate with her dead daughter. John scoffs at her fascination with such mumbo-jumbo, yet seems himself dogged by strange premonitions. Yes, you've guessed it: she isn't psychic at all. He is.

And that's about it. Not much of a premise. And not a lot of plot. But plenty of mood. This may be based on a Daphne Du Maurier story, it may feature two of the finest leads in seventies cinema, but essentially the film is carried by Roeg's otherworldly direction - all distorted lenses, bizarre cross-cutting and non-linear timescales. Roeg's genius, as previously declared in Performance and Walkabout, is his ability to position his films not merely from the point of view of his protagonists, but to place the camera firmly inside their minds. Time, continuity of events, even mere sounds and images become abstractions, all mixed-up through Roeg's wholly unique use of montage. A drop of 'blood' smears across a slide transparency moments before the daughter drowns; a block of masonry gradually falls in slow motion as we cross cut to Sutherland working below in real time; a moment of doubt is cross-cut with a sinister 'reaction' shot of the old women laughing at an unheard joke. Like a poet, Roeg offers no explanation for these images, but then he doesn't need to - their beauty is that we understand them on a purely instinctive, intuitive level. A case in point is the celebrated sex scene, which shocks not because it is supposedly explicit (in fact, clever editing and suggestive angles means that we see much less than we think we see) but because Roeg intercuts it with shots of the couple dressing for dinner. Suddenly what could have been the obligatory gratuitous nude scene (Christie was then a major sex symbol, and Sutherland had his fans too) becomes a disturbingly intimate insight into their relationship and the effect their daughter's death has had. It's too painful, too raw, to be titillating.

This kind of montaging occurs throughout the film, indeed by juxtaposing unrelated shots and scenes, Roeg is almost telling a story that isn't there (surely the 'blood' was just a coincidence; how could the women really have been laughing at Sutherland?). Oh, there's a mystery too - is the small red-coated figure Sutherland glimpses really his daughter returned from the dead? - but even that is tenuous, possibly imagined (like the ambiguous mystery in Antonioni's Blow Up, Coppola's The Conversation or Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut), a maguffin to facilitate Roeg's examination of loss, guilt and denial. Like Blue Velvet or 2001, Don't Look Now is a rare, brilliant example of cinema being used to tell a story that would be unfeasible in any other medium (the film is markedly different to Du Maurier's original story). But then this impressionistic approach has always been the true legacy of British cinema (see Michael Powell, Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Donald Cammell, Danny Boyle, early Richard Lester, even early Ridley Scott, not to mention honorary Brits like Losey and Kubrick), not gangster movies, period dramas or genteel rom-coms. And no-one, but no-one, pushed the envelope further than Roeg. Hopefully with this DVD reissue, people will look now (ouch!) and give this genius the credit he deserves.

The most impressive film I have seen
Dont Look Now remains Director Nicholas Roeg's masterpiece. An eerie study of two people, (the Baxters, played by Sutherland and Christie), trying to come to terms with the death of their young daughter.

Visually, the film is superb. Shot in a wintery Venice, Roeg captures some impressive images, and makes excellent use of colour. Particularly noticeable is the placement of flashes of red in different scenes, echoing the clothes worn by the Baxter's daughter when she drowns at the start of the film.

It is these recurring images that prey on Sutherland throughout the film, ultimately convincing him that his daughter is still with him, and leading to the film's disturbing denouement.

Sutherland and Christie are both excellent throughout. The erotic scene in particular is beautifully acted, showing how the couple use love to overcome their grief.

The film's ending remains genuinely chilling no matter how many times I see it. The closing scenes are proof, if any were needed, that graphic displays of blood and violence are not necessary in order to scare people.

If there has been a better film made than this I have not seen it.