For me, the most terrifying scene in Don't Look Now is a testament to Nicolas Roeg's direction, Scott and Bryant's script, and Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie's skill as actors as the scene itself is nowhere near traditionally frightening, and out of context seems almost bland and/or relieving. The scene in question occurs after Sutherland's Baxter chases what he thinks to be his wife across Venice, only to call home to England and find she had arrived safe and sound earlier that day. The scene was terrifying not in that I wondered what kind of phantom he had seen, but in the absolute strangeness of the performances across the phone lines. Christie's voice is too-assuring and virtually prattles on that…

Part of Hoop-Tober

“The churches belong to God, but he doesn’t seem to care about them. Does he have other priorities? We have stopped listening.”

Denial

The little girl in the red coat ran down the Venetian alleyway. She ducked around a corner and out of view. She...she couldn’t be Christine (Sharon Williams), could she? Christine had been dead for...how long had it been? It hardly mattered. She had always been dead. She had always been right next to them. Laughing and smiling in her little red coat, lungs filling with water like the canals, submerging like the buildings of this sinking Italian ruin.

But Heather (Hilary Mason) sees her. She has the second sight. She and Wendy (Clelia Matania)…

Don't you love it when a film completely brings its respective story into full focus? Don't Look Now, for much of its run-time, was meandering and boring at points. I found it hard to stay invested into the story, but there was always a new development to make sure I didn't turn it off. And then, the final 10 minutes happened....

I don't think I've had an opinion of a film change so fast. Truly, as Don't Look Now had its end credits rolling, I was unsettled beyond belief. Eyes darting, hearing every sound, seeing every shadow, sensing every presence; The only cure for how freaking scared I was as a result of the film was sleep.

So, here I…

This is the only movie I’m sure I’ll be putting on my Sight and Sound all time ballot, and knowing this has prompted me to re-examine my criteria (and maybe rewatch Don’t Look Now, not that I ever need an excuse). 

 I can’t say that Don’t Look Now is the best film I’ve ever seen; I don’t even think it’s flawless. The long section after Julie Christie goes back to England and Sutherland skulks around in between meetings with the local authorities is finally essential to Roeg’s structure, but it’s draggy compared to the amazingly pressurized scenes that precede it; I personally love the staging of the finale, but enough other people find it lacking or laughable that I have…

Oh, I hate when this happens. Everyone else likes this, so why don't I?

I see the artsiness. The shot at the beginning of the little girl in her raincoat reflected in the water was so innocent yet so ominous, and I was like yes, this is gonna be great!! Then... nothing happened. Then some more nothing happened. Then I fell asleep, woke up, and thought a cat had stepped on something that took me to porn. 70s mustache porn, no less. But no, this 110 minute movie has a random, uncomfortably long sex scene and I'm not a prude but 1) nobody wants to see 70s people having sex and 2) if they do, porn exists. And most importantly,…

Roeg adapts a haunting, grief-stricken gothic-horror short story by Daphne Du Maurier about coming to terms with the seemingly random, chaotic, and inexplicable nature of death, and—in the process of loosely borrowing grammar from Hitchcock (who also adapted Du Maurier into Rebecca and The Birds), Resnais, and the Giallo in order to conjure this idea cinematically—ends up with one of the most surreal, impressionistic psychological horror experiences maybe ever assembled.

The first time I watched this I think I was a bit taken aback by how familiar its actual ghost, serial killer, and "grief" narrative elements are when juxtaposed with such a radical, temporal form but I realized on this watch that making the grounded and rational feel like a…