In Don’t Look Now, so much of this atmosphere hinges on the film’s unique style, one that often gets in the way of smooth narrative communication and clearly defined characters. So, I was surprised to start thinking of the film through the lens of Sutherland’s performance. Yet after rewatching it, it became clear how much Sutherland’s twining of composure and chaos, his strangely brimming sternness, contributes to the film’s disruptive style.
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It’s been a rough year. I’m sure you’ve heard it countless times before, and you’re already familiar with the complaint’s structure. It starts by listing off the newest string of political catastrophes, global conflicts, economic crises, and ecological devastations, before ending with the kicker: dead celebrities. We’re heading for a recession and Shelly Duval died; 2024 sucks. It’s been pointed out to me that bemoaning the death of your favourite actor in the same breath as criticizing concrete sociopolitical conditions risks, at the very least, ringing a bit hollow. But we still do it, or at least I do. I think it’s because, in a roundabout way, it gives me hope. When there’s nothing but disaster in my feed, when protests keep going unheard, when taking action starts to feel impossible, it reminds me that there’s at least one thing I can still do, even if it’s small – watch a movie, listen to an album, read a book, pay tribute to what was, and still is, good.
This year, that reminder was delivered in the rumbling voice of Donald Sutherland. After the iconic Canadian actor’s recent death, I was overcome with a desire to revisit his performance in the foggy and opaque world of Don’t Look Now (1973), a film that digs into loss, trauma, and the kinds of meaning to be made from them. The third feature by enigmatic image-maker Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now has a canonical reputation, not only in cinematic history but also for me personally. I had only seen it once, over a decade ago, but its unsettling atmosphere marked me deeply. I loved the film for many of the reasons it’s been canonised as a landmark in supernatural horror – it blends striking visuals with disruptive formal techniques to embrace confusion over coherence, mystery over mastery. Along with many of my favorite ’70s films, like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Suspiria (1977), 3 Women (1977), Wake in Fright (1971), it blends traditional European art cinema’s disruption of Hollywood conventions – what David Bordwell, another 2024 loss, calls “recurrent violations of the classical norm” (59) – with pulpier qualities from horror and thriller genres. But there’s something about the way these films blend art film sensibilities with lowly genre tropes that sets them apart, marked by a deep, even ontological, sense of dread. That’s to say, the anxieties these films filter don’t simply feel social and cultural, they’re rooted in the nature of reality itself. The films don’t just have weird people doing weird things, but time and space are weird, the films’ logic is weird, the films’ world is weird. In Don’t Look Now, so much of this atmosphere hinges on the film’s unique style, one that often gets in the way of smooth narrative communication and clearly defined characters. So, I was surprised to start thinking of the film through the lens of Sutherland’s performance. Yet, after rewatching it, it became clear how much Sutherland’s twining of composure and chaos, his strangely brimming sternness, contributes to the film’s disruptive style.
The story follows a couple, John and Laura, as they deal with the sudden death of their young daughter, Christine. Roeg starts the film at the precise moment of this traumatic loss, opening on a harrowing scene of John pulling his drowned daughter out of a pond after feeling a sudden premonition of her death. Sutherland’s explosion of sorrow, wailing in painful slow motion, is never seen again in the film. Instead, we cut to an unspecified point in the future when John and Laura have moved to Venice. John has successfully suppressed his feelings to focus on his work, the restoration of an old church, but Christine’s death still looms over the couple. Unlike John, Laura is overcome with grief, caught between depression and an emotional overwhelm that John struggles to handle. John’s frustration with Laura’s emotions reveals the extent to which he’s avoiding his own. For John, Christine is dead and there’s nothing to be done about it but move on, doggedly and blindly. When Laura begins communing with two elderly mystics, receiving otherworldly messages from Christine, it pushes John over the edge. Despite his own experience of premonition, or perhaps because of it, John is unable to accept his wife’s coping mechanism. Christine is dead, he yells at her in that booming Sutherland voice, she does not come peeping with messages from behind the fucking grave! However, despite this committed rationalism, John begins to lose his grip once Laura leaves Venice. He starts spotting his wife with the old ladies when she’s meant to be elsewhere, he sees a murder scene being cleared up on the street, he gives in to conspiratorial thinking, he wants to talk to the police, and eventually his grasp on reality becomes suspect. All this culminates in an obscure but highly violent finale that sees John chasing the ghosts of his repressed past through cavernous Venetian streets. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for him.
What stuck with me over the years was the film’s elusive and mysterious atmosphere. So, while rewatching, I was quite struck by a rigorously clear, even didactic, formal strategy. From the opening onward, Roeg consistently slices up his scenes, cutting back and forth between different locations or different points in time. This crosscutting gives the film its slippery quality, inviting a temporal and spatial confusion that has come to define Roeg’s style, but it’s also how Roeg crafts an alternative form of coherence. Disruptive cuts happen at precise moments to build clear visual rhymes – a zoom in on a red coat cuts to a zoom out from a red fireplace, Laura’s hand gesture cuts to Christine making the same gesture, a ball being dropped cuts to a cup being knocked over. While these rhymes soften the spatiotemporal disruption by giving the cuts a sense of meaning, a reason why they’re matched together, this associative meaning is crucially supported by a deeper emotional meaning. When Laura and John make love in the film’s most famous scene, for example, Roeg repeatedly cuts away to innocuous moments of John getting dressed and Laura doing her makeup. Here, visual rhymes ease us into the scene’s crosscutting – we move between images of the couple getting undressed and then dressing themselves back up – but after several consecutive minutes, these parallels take on more significance. Small routines are contrasted with intense sex, and we see the couple’s elation blended with their mundanity, their raw passions and their composed personas. By the end of Roeg’s persistent parallels, this thematic duality is impossible to ignore, and it gives an emotional logic to a scene that deliberately confuses time and space. The cuts are weird, but they still make sense.
Donald Sutherland’s performance is indispensable to this formal strategy. He often brings a kind of occulted authority to his roles, the elusive feeling that he possesses a hidden or secret knowledge that we have yet to be granted. His long gaunt face, perpetually sinking down, seems anchored by some invisible weight. It’s the face of someone who knows something (it’s perhaps no surprise that the two most recurrent genres in his filmography are murder mysteries and spy thrillers). The film instrumentalizes this fleshy knowledge from the very first scene. Here, insistent crosscutting is used once again to clearly link Christine’s descent into the pond with John and Laura working in their cottage home. However, it’s Donald Sutherland’s face that transforms this connection into something horrific. After examining some architectural photographs, John suddenly sees a kind of stigmata in one of them – blood spilling from a red hood. Slowly, that long Sutherland face rises from the photo, eyes bulging and face stricken. What has he seen? We’ve encountered the same strange image he has, and perhaps we suspect something vaguely bad, but he seems to know something in a way that we don’t. He leaves the room in trance, and then we cut to Christine falling into her watery grave. His face warns us of Christine’s death as much as the photograph warned him. His performance gives the emotional coherence to Roeg’s associative editing.
When you join the human face with the back-and-forth quality of parallel editing, you get one of the fundamental patterns of film grammar: shot/reverse shot. Given Roeg’s penchant for parallels, his skill at deploying of an actor’s face, and his exploration of how we can make meaning from within confusion, it’s perhaps not surprising that Don’t Look Now’s mysterious ending relies on a breakdown of the shot/reverse shot pattern. In the film’s penultimate scene, John chases a mysterious figure through dark, fog-filled alleyways until he corners his suspect in a claustrophobic cul-de-sac. Confident he’s in control of the situation, John approaches this figure and tries to coax them out of hiding. Here, we get a typical shot/reverse shot pattern between John and the back of the figure’s head, a pattern that’s ruptured only when the figure turns around and reveals that they are not who John thought they were. To punctuate the disruption, Roeg cuts away to a barrage of other faces – a man waking up from a dream, the glazed eyes of the mystic woman, John kissing a gargoyle, Laura laughing, old photographs, police sketches, Christine playing – all as John reacts to his miscalculation. These faces disrupt both the conventional shot/reverse shot pattern and the crosscutting convention Roeg has built throughout the film. There is no clear associative or emotional connection between these images, no clear spatial or temporal connection, no discernable meaning.
Both formally and thematically, Don’t Look Now explores the process of making meaning in the wake of trauma. Coherence seems to exist at the local level, generated through formal systems that give us a sense of control and an understanding of reality, but these systems exist within a reality that surpasses them, eludes them, even breaks them down. If we follow these systems too strictly, they can give us a false sense of mastery, leading us down the wrong street to follow the wrong person. Placed in the context of postwar Europe, this breakdown of meaning takes on a very specific historical interpretation, but I think the film has just as much to say in our present moment. When the world we find ourselves in is full of disruption and panic, it’s tempting to retreat into absolutes, into a false sense of mastery that feels so empowering, but too often these absolutes prove illusory. John’s refusal to deal with his destabilizing feelings – his sense of dread, hurt, and premonition – pushes him into a rigid rationality that doesn’t fully function in the hallucinatory, shattered universe Roeg puts him in. It’s a reminder that callousness closes you off to the world, that even when it hurts, even when it doesn’t make sense, you should still feel.
Works Cited
3 Women. Directed by Robert Altman, Lion’s Gate Films, 1977.
Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Criticism, vol. 4, no. 1, Fall 1979, pp. 56-64.
Don’t Look Now. Directed by Nicholas Roeg, Casey Productions, 1973.
Picnic at Hanging Rock. Directed by Peter Weir, British Empire Films Australia, 1975.
Suspiria. Directed by Dario Argento, Seda Spettacoli, 1977.
Wake in Fright. Directed by Ted Kotcheff, NTL Productions, 1971.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
