Blind psychics, red macs and peculiar priests: a look at the 1970s British classic DON’T LOOK NOW
Director Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, based on a chilling short story by Daphne du Maurier, is frequently voted the Best Horror Film of all time. It stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple trying to recover from a tragedy, who take a trip to Venice – but a chilling encounter with a blind psychic, who claims to be in touch with the couple’s dead daughter, has devastating consequences. Here’s a look back, with the help of some celebrity fans, at this hugely influential horror film, available as part of the Vintage Classics range from STUDIOCANAL.
THOMAS VINTERBERG, director
“It’s one of my all-time favourite movies – Nic Roeg was a master. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are out of this world, amazing, in this movie. There’s a particular love/sex scene in a hotel room which I think is the best sex scene ever made. I highly recommend this movie – I watch it a couple of times each year. Respect to Nic Roeg for this masterpiece.”
HUGH BONNEVILLE, actor
“There’s one shot in this film that really set me on edge when I first saw the film over thirty years ago, and it’s stayed with me. It’s a tiny moment, an apparently inconsequential angle on a priest opening his coat, and reaching into his inside pocket to get… a handkerchief. That’s all it is, but it’s so unexpected and unusual and odd that it unsettled me for the rest of the film, ratcheting up the tension in what was already a pretty uncomfortable watch. So whenever I think of DON’T LOOK NOW, I get this knot in my stomach as I think of that image. It’s amazing how films can suddenly get you like that. In the hands of a lesser director it wouldn’t have made it into the final cut, but Nic Roeg plays with structure, time, emotions, suspense so brilliantly in this film.”
ALICE LOWE, actress, writer, director
“DON’T LOOK NOW is an absolutely classic, timeless horror. So many films have been inspired by its use of colour, imagery and editing. A unique atmosphere which stays with you, oozing through you like the water in a damp canal! The Venice setting continues to make it one of the more original horror films, and has changed how I see Venice forever! Roeg’s editing choices always make his films have a shifting reality, a sense that nothing is solid beneath your feet, reality a mirror illusion, giving everything a dream quality. He changed the way many filmmakers approached horror. And this is a masterpiece of the genre.”
ALISON OWEN, producer
“DON’T LOOK NOW is the most haunting movie I’ve ever seen. When I arrived at university in 1979, we literally formed our tribe of friends by the rule of who could quote lines from the film. If you ‘got it’, you were one of us. Later on, when I had two small daughters, I could never let them wear a red coat – just the sight of a child in one sends the fear into me. That’s the enduring legacy of this masterpiece – once seen, it never leaves you.”
BRETT GOLDSTEIN, actor
“DON’T LOOK NOW is my answer to ‘objectively the greatest film of all time’ and the remastered edition only further cements my view. Nicolas Roeg’s film is an encapsulation of how we experience time, how we live in the past and the future and very rarely exist in the present. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland define the art of screen acting. This film, in my mind, is the best portrait of a marriage ever captured in cinema. Incredibly there was no rehearsal, yet you entirely believe this is a couple who love each other deeply and who have been together for years. The oft-discussed sex scene is extraordinary, not because it looks so real, but because it is a rare example of a sex scene that can make you cry, a true reconnection of two people disconnected by grief. The way we see the before and after simultaneously is the perfect expression of how sometimes we experience nostalgia and sadness for events passed, even while the event itself is taking place. An endlessly watchable film, filled with mystery and meaning and beauty and heartbreak and pure love. Oh yeah, and it’s also an absolutely f***ing terrifying horror.”
MAY EL-TOUKHY, director
“The first time I watched DON’T LOOK NOW was while I was still in film school and it made a huge impression. It made me realise that it is not only the content – the storyline, the location, the specifics of the characters – that makes a film special. It is how you as a director exercise and use those elements, that potentially makes a great film. The film is a very emotional and cathartic ride, that will make you wonder and ponder – and I personally love when a film can make your head spin like that”
REECE SHEARSMITH, actor, writer
“DON’T LOOK NOW is a kaleidoscopic, puzzle box of a film that ensnares you with its creeping dread and never lets go. From the opening scenes that show the accidental drowning of a little girl playing near a pond, the editing in DON’T LOOK NOW manages to unsettle and terrify. As the film cuts back and forth from fragmented moments in time, the story splintering like shards of glass-it makes for an incredibly moving study in grief, loss and love. Venice, water, reflections and shadows are all on beautiful display here, in a story that embraces the medium of film and dazzles in how it tells its devastating story. I think it’s one of my all time favourite films and STUDIOCANAL have released a beautiful edition here that displays Nic Roeg’s Venice set masterpiece in all its haunting splendour. Little red macs have never been so terrifying.”
SALLY HAWKINS, actress
“I love the book and du Maurier’s writing. I watched this with a dear old school friend many moons ago and we cowered behind the sofa for most of it, scaring ourselves witless. It still takes me right back there. I watched it before teen years far too young, but like all great films watched in early forming years they become part of you. The layering of images and the folding of time and playing with it… I can’t really put it into words… I find explaining why one film has an effect over another too hard”
SANDY POWELL, costume designer
“DON’T LOOK NOW is probably my all-time favourite film. I have seen it many times over the years but experienced it again recently for the first time in a while. I have an extraordinary visceral reaction every time I watch it even though I know it so well, but maybe because I know it so well. The devastating opening sequence is so powerful with its terrifying air of foreboding, when the idyllic mood of a lazy afternoon is disrupted by tragedy. There is something about Julie Christie’s character Laura’s blissful obliviousness to the imminent horror that makes me feel sick to the stomach. The final scene in the film of the funeral cortege in the creepily empty and atmospheric Venice also packs a punch, because we have already witnessed it in John’s earlier premonition. The build-up of tension is greater than any conventional horror film. I never tire of putting myself masochistically through the emotional trauma of watching DON’T LOOK NOW as it’s the work of a visionary genius, and there is nothing else quite like it.”
HOSSEIN AMINI, scriptwriter
“DON’T LOOK NOW is a film I go back to again and again. Not just for its gripping atmosphere of menace and tension but for its heartbreaking exploration of marriage, parenthood, grief and faith. Venice has never looked so beautiful and chilling at the same time and the film contains the most realistic and poignant sex scene in all of cinema. A horror classic and a masterful look at love and loss.”
TIM BEVAN, producer
“Surely one of the very best British films of this era was Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW – its audacious edit, spectacular visual vista, tense storytelling and stunning performances are as modern and progressive as cinema today as when it was made nearly fifty years ago. It was one of the films of the seventies that I watched as a young man that inspired me to pursue a career in cinema. Nic was an early mentor to me and his fearless and individual approach to film inspires me to this day.”
DON’T LOOK NOW IS AVAILABLE ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND UHD FROM STUDIOCANAL NOW
