Don’t Look Now (1973) October 1st, 2024

It’s that time of year again when I write reviews of our October 2024 horror film lineup! Which time of the year you ask? February. We began with one of the films from our 100 Movies to See Before You Die book and a longtime member of the Criterion Collection, Don’t Look Now.

More a giallo than strictly horror, Don’t Look Now is a story of the grief haunting the parents who survive their child. Unexplained premonitions and visions of the future torment Donald Sutherland while he and his wife reconnect in Venice after their daughter drowned in a pond on their estate. A beautiful snapshot of Venetian life in the early 1970s adds to Don’t Look Now‘s otherworldly feel as the mystery unfolds.

Maybe my bias against giallo has skewed my take and I’ve unfairly lumped Don’t Look Now into that maligned genre seeing that its director Nicolas Roeg is decidedly British. Perhaps I’m learning I don’t like Donald Sutherland? I really didn’t like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he’s completely forgettable in The Dirty Dozen, but I really enjoyed The Day of the Locust! Perhaps I just don’t enjoy seeing him in an overly contorted handheld sex scene where he spends most of the sequence with his face in his scene partner’s arm pit… Regardless of genre, Don’t Look Now isn’t my kind of movie.