Retrospective: Don't Look Now (Patreon)

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) has his first premonition of his daughter Christine's death while looking at a photo of a church. Spotting in the corner of the photo a small person in a red coat. At that moment, he senses that something is horribly wrong; that his daughter in a similar red coat is in mortal danger. He dashes out of his house to find his daughter dead. John has lived vicariously through photographs and old architecture; he experiences all of time in a single moment, but he can't see what's happened in front of him.

After the death of his daughter, little changes. John and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are in Venice. Despite the drastic change in space from pastoral England, John emotionally hasn't left his country house. Laura sees everything clearly, but John, the clairvoyant in their marriage, sees almost nothing. He cannot move on from his daughter's death, but he won't allow himself to acknowledge it either.

50% of this is communicated through Donald Sutherland's eyebrows. Before Sutherland died, I was going to round out the week with a review of Spotlight, making this Press Movie Week on my Patreon (does that make up for the lack of Leads this week?) But once Sutherland passed, I figured it would be best to talk about one of the great actors of our time in one of the finest horror films ever made.

Don't Look Now is indubitably a horror film; narrow alley ways, serial killers, premonitions, the death of a child, the toll grief takes on a happy marriage. A24 markets Ari Aster movies as horror that are less explicitly horror than this. What's scarier than a grieving man not looking after his own household? This isn't quite the occult thriller people make it out to be: Don't Look Now is a domestic tragedy where a man rejects the help of the supernatural to catastrophic results. It's a story of guilt, of a man who doesn't seem to have wanted kids to begin with, who's torn apart by his failure to protect his daughter, who feels horrible about not wanting to be a parent in the first place.

These themes are essentially all that horror films cover nowadays. It's not that Nicolas Roeg made elevated horror; all of his films are kind of primally terrifying. But Don't Look Now is a road map that Mike Flanagan, Robert Eggers, and Ari Aster would later follow. Every actor who plays a father in a horror film is doing variations on Donald Sutherland's performance here. Even The Shining, the greatest film of all time, is perhaps psychically indebted to Roeg (if not explicitly so). I almost loathe to write about Don't Look Now. So if you're reading this piece without having seen the movie first, please don't look at this review for another two hours. Go watch Don't Look Now in memory of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Sutherland, and in celebration of the still-living Julie Christie. Live with this movie for a while. Because living with something is the greatest horror of all.

Also you can see why Warren Beatty thought Donald Sutherland was fucking his girlfriend. That's the most realistic sex scene ever shot.