Product Description

Working with elements of the traditional horror genre - second sight, ESP, warnings from the dead, a mad killer - and a cinematography of disquieting beauty and dreamlike sense of dislocation, director Nicolas Roeg weaves a fabric of anxiety that questions all reality. The evocative use of the back streets of Venice is a sinister participant in the action based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. This intensely erotic and macabre film boasts outstanding performances by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12495 in DVD
• Brand: CHRISTIE,JULIE
• Released on: 2002-09-03
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now once seemed radically new with its kaleidoscopic imagery, dreamlike editing, and willingness to let mystery be mysterious on several levels of reality/illusion--plus art-house darling Julie Christie in a long, nude love scene! Nowadays, this 1974 adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier ghost story looks almost classical. Following the drowning of their child in England, Laura (Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) have come to dank, eternally dying Venice, where he is supervising the restoration of a moldering church and she is either slipping into or climbing out of madness with the help of a pair of creepy spinster sisters, one of whom can "see" even though blind. John may share this psychic power, though he resists accepting it as the canals fill with murder victims, surface realities turn shimmery as water, and a red-coated figure--the daughter's ghost?--keeps flickering in the corner of our vision. Though surreal and perplexing, the film does eventually add up, and the ending remains a real throat-grabber. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Not for all tastes -- but a brilliant, frightening film
DON'T LOOK NOW is a film for people with a particular taste, and the unwary viewer will either be pleasantly or unpleasantly shocked. From a seemingly simple premise -- a couple trying to overcome their daughter's death, and the odd psychic they meet while staying in Venice -- director Nicholas Roeg creates a thriller/horror movie/dazzling puzzles that slowly infects your mind and then shocks you with its bizarre twists.

Be warned: this isn't a movie for everyone. It relies on visual puzzles and clues and an incredible lot of misdirection for its effect. This might bore some people; it had me riveted with the first scene and held me up through the mind-bending conclusion. Like THE SIXTH SENSE, SLEUTH, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and THE OTHERS, the film is playing a massive deception on the audience and the characters, engaing in a strange game that pays off in an incredibly satisfying (if devastating) way. Every time you think you know what kind of story you're watching, the movie starts veering in another direction, and only the finale finally makes the purpose of the plot clear.

Director Roeg, a former cinematographer, crafts an eerie vision of Venice as damp, mouldy, and crumbling, and his visual compositions have a startling quality that adds to the bizarre and alienated moodof the film. Although few movies have directly copied the story of DON'T LOOK NOW, its directorial style has become the standard for such filmmakers as David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan, and David Fincher.

This is a landmark piece of work and worth viewing if you enjoy films full of mystery and intelligence (for example, the movies I listed above) and unusual visual style.

An Eyeful
One of the creepiest films ever made. This one stays with you, and all of the participants are crucial to the film's effect, so it's not just the artful photography and editing. The beautiful Julie Christie, always a bit mysterious, has an amazing sex scene with Donald Sutherland (they play a husband and wife in this film), that is intercut with shots of the two getting dressed afterward. Erotica, not pornography, although it treads a thin line. Inspired from start to finish, Sutherland's slow motion fall from a scaffold is foreshadowed earlier by Christie's slow motion blackout at a restaurant table. There are many moments of cinemagraphic brilliance throughout, and Roeg's triumph here is how he manages to take a rather simple story and make it seem more complex and deep than it really is. Because the film is so visually stimulating, the shocking ending is not critical to its success; in other words, knowing what's going to happen doesn't matter, as it would if the rest of the movie weren't so stunning. This isn't just one of the best horror pictures ever, it's a very good movie, above categorization.

Elegant Terror
This film, which features Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at their most young and gorgeous, may be one of the scariest movies ever made.

Based on a Daphne DuMaurier story, it concerns two grieving parents (Christie and Sutherland) who have lost their young daughter in a horrible drowning accident right on their opulent English estate. Mourning beyond reason, the shattered couple goes to Venice, where Sutherland repeatedly sees visions of his dead daughter, always just out of reach.

Through disjointed stream-of-consciousness images, gorgeous views of Venice, lush colors, eerie people with second sight, and one of the most erotic love scenes on film, we feel this couple's anguish, fear and desperate love for one another. And we know, simply by feeling it, that there is great danger lurking just out of sight. But we don't know what it is.

As the suspense builds unbearably, the viewer is mesmerized by the photography, the music, the beauty--and yes, the grief. And when the end comes...well, let's just say that you'll want to leave the lights on for many nights to come.

An absolutely brilliant film.