When the sister talks about her “vision,” Laura can look away only to face the sister’s reflected image or, looking further, the aged washroom attendant hunched in a corner like an evil eye- the mirrors build a momentum of panic. We have been prepared by the early sequences for inescapable happenings and everything begins to look sinister, even the harmless touch of a hand on Laura’s back.
In the movie, we follow her into the ladies’ room of the Venetian restaurant, a cell of mirrors that seem to close in even as they reflect. In the Du Maurier version, for example, Laura’s first encounter with the sisters occurs offstage after the breezy opening and we have to take the trauma of the situation on faith.
Many of the key scenes in the movie, and certainly the most interesting ones, don’t even occur in the original, and virtually every piece of detail that gives resonance to the story has been added. He has not so much taken a story as a suggestion, kept a few names and turns of plot, then worked it up into something entirely new-a thriller that extends its own limits, closer to the supernatural stories of Borges or Henry James. It’s no news that bad books often make good movies-especially bad books with a strong action line-but what Roeg has achieved is more than just a successful adaptation: he has transformed the nature of the material itself, providing literary qualities (character, atmosphere) that should have been in the story in the first place. But Roeg and his excellent scriptwriters, Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, have taken this disposable piece of prose and turned it into a kind of art. It’s the supernatural as entertainment, the necessary spice to a story as gooey as treacle tart. This is Du Maurier toying with the supernatural to produce respectable chills by the fireside. But what did he really see-except, perhaps, a clue to his own bizarre fate? With no explanation at hand and panicked by the wave of maniacal murders sweeping through Venice, he turns to the police. Then, having seen his wife off to the airport, he spies her later the same afternoon in a launch on the Grand Canal with the two sisters. The plot thickens with a warning (from the beyond via the sisters) to leave Venice but John pooh-poohs the whole business, even as events become increasingly odd. The girls are two Scottish sisters wintering in Venice, as weird in their quiet, well-bred way as the sisters in Macbeth, but certainly not up to hypnosis: it’s simply that one of them, who is blind and telepathic to boot, has just seen the daughter’s ghost. “ ‘Don’t look now,’ John said to his wife, ‘but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotize me.’” John and Laura are in Venice to forget the recent death of their daughter (dead, more prosaically, of spinal meningitis). The 1970 Daphne du Maurier short story on which Don’t Look Now is based was a tame enough piece of psychic hokum. It has the sinister uneasiness of glancing at the unseen: seeing too little to understand its pattern, but seeing too much to ignore it anymore. Like the very best thrillers-and Don’t Look Now is one of the best ever made- Roeg’s film makes our blood run just a little faster not because it shocks but because it disturbs. It’s not another world, but this world with the wires exposed.
Before the first sequence of the movie has run its course, we have been placed in a climate where things are not merely what they seem but something more. The boy stands watching, terrified, sucking the arc of blood from his cut thumb. The breath of a hopeless artificial resuscitation becomes a howl of rage. Then as the spill spreads over the color slide in an arc of red, the rhythm of subliminal associations reaches a breaking point and John bolts from the house, too late to save his daughter from drowning in the pond. The bicycle runs over a pane of glass lying in the field (shattering the silence as well as the glass) John knocks his drink over. John tosses Laura some cigarettes their daughter tosses a ball at the edge of a pond. Nothing is happening except the camera cutting back and forth between them with an ominous metronome suspense. In the house, John (Donald Sutherland) is examining a color slide of a stained glass window (he restores churches) while his wife Laura (Julie Christie) reads lazily by the fire.
A boy is riding his bicycle while his younger sister plays with a ball. Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now opens on a raw Sunday afternoon in the English countryside.