Don't Look Now

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now opened in 1973 and won the BAFTA for Best Cinematography (Anthony B. Richmond). It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and it has a secure place among the greatest British horror films. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier's 1971 short story of the same name, with a screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, it confirmed Roeg as one of the most distinctive editing-driven British directors of his generation.

John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) travel to a wintry, off-season Venice in the months after the death of their young daughter; John has been commissioned to restore an ancient church. There they meet two elderly Scottish sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania), one of them a blind psychic, who claim to be able to see the dead girl. From there the Baxters are drawn deeper into the city, into the sisters' company and into their own grief.

Roeg had started out as a cinematographer (Walkabout, Performance), and here he cross-cuts elliptically throughout, on a scale British cinema had not attempted before. The opening drowning sequence and the famous love scene between Christie and Sutherland have been written about again and again as some of the most carefully built sequences in the medium. Pino Donaggio's score was his first major film commission, after a 1960s career as an Italian pop singer, and it launched a distinguished second career in horror scoring that took in most of Brian De Palma's subsequent work.