Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film Don’t Look Now adapts a short story by Daphne du Maurier into something far more fractured and emotionally destabilising than its source material. The film follows John and Laura Baxter, a married couple who travel to Venice after the accidental drowning of their young daughter Christine. What they encounter there is not simply grief but its psychic aftershock, rendered in a visual language that remains one of the most distinctive achievements in British cinema.
Roeg’s Venice is a city of reflections, shadows and red. It is a place where time folds back on itself, where premonition and memory occupy the same frame. The film’s reputation rests not on plot but on texture, on the way its editing and colour design communicate what dialogue cannot. Half a century on from its release, Don’t Look Now still functions as a masterclass in how cinema can externalise inner states.
The Source – Daphne du Maurier’s Short Story
Du Maurier published the story Don’t Look Now in her 1971 collection Not After Midnight. The piece is quieter and more conventionally structured than Roeg’s adaptation. It follows a British couple holidaying in Venice, where the husband, John, becomes obsessed with a sighting of their dead daughter by a woman he meets. In du Maurier’s telling the daughter dies of meningitis rather than by drowning, and the story is more compact and more openly a horror piece. Its shocking climax, John’s murder by a figure he mistakes for a child, is one Roeg would keep almost intact.
The story draws on du Maurier’s own long relationship with Venice, where she holidayed repeatedly. Her Venice is a city of decay and unease, a place where beauty masks something rotting underneath. Roeg kept the setting but rewrote the emotional architecture. He shifted the focus from external horror to the internal landscape of grief, using the city as a psychological projection rather than a literal haunted space.
Screenwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant worked with Roeg on the screenplay. They retained du Maurier’s core premise but opened the marriage to exploration, giving Laura (Julie Christie) a parallel experience of grief and psychic openness that complicates the film’s dynamics. The result is a story about two people processing the same loss in incompatible ways.
Editing as Meaning – Roeg’s Non-Linear Method
Roeg’s editing style is the film’s true subject. Before Don’t Look Now, Roeg had already developed his fragmented approach on Performance (1970) with Donald Cammell and Walkabout (1971). But Venice is where the method reached its most precise and purposeful form.
The film opens with the death of Christine, but Roeg does not present it as a self-contained sequence. Images from the drowning are intercut with scenes of the family at home, so that the catastrophe is woven into the texture of ordinary life rather than set apart from it. This is not stylistic showmanship. It mirrors the way traumatic memory actually works: not as a linear narrative but as intrusive fragments that surface without warning.
Throughout the film, Roeg uses match cuts to link disparate moments. A flash of red (the child’s coat, a woman’s dress, a smear of light on water) becomes a connective thread that pulls the viewer through time and space. The editing creates a sense of fatalism. Events that appear to be happening simultaneously are revealed later to be separated by days or weeks, and vice versa. The audience experiences the same temporal confusion as the characters, who cannot tell whether they are remembering, anticipating or hallucinating.
Critics have long noted how Roeg’s associative cutting keeps visual and narrative threads running alongside each other without ever fully converging. This is what gives Don’t Look Now its persistent sense of unease. The film never lets the viewer settle into a single timeline or emotional register.
The Colour Red – A Visual Thesis
The colour red in Don’t Look Now is arguably the most discussed use of colour in British cinema after the Technicolor saturated worlds of Powell and Pressburger. Red appears everywhere: in Christine’s coat, in the small hooded figure John keeps glimpsing in the streets, in sudden flashes of fabric and light against the greys and browns of the winter city.
Roeg and his cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond used red as both a narrative signal and an emotional trigger. The colour does not function as a simple symbol. It does not always mean danger or death. Sometimes it means love. Sometimes it means presence. Its multiplicity is what makes it so effective. The viewer learns to feel anxious whenever red appears, but the anxiety is always slightly different because the context changes.
Du Maurier’s original story uses colour sparingly. The red coat is present, but it does not carry the same visual weight. Roeg and Richmond expanded its significance, making it a motif that binds the entire film, until the viewer reads every flash of red as a charge waiting to go off.
Venice as Psychological Landscape
Roeg’s Venice is not the Venice of tourist brochures. It is a labyrinth of narrow alleys, murky canals and crumbling facades. The city is shot in autumn and winter, stripped of its summer crowds, reduced to a network of spaces where isolation can take hold.
The production design emphasises disorientation. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is shown navigating the same streets repeatedly, always seeming to arrive at the same dead ends. Roeg uses the city’s geography to externalise John’s mental state: he is lost, and the city mirrors his lostness. The water, everywhere in Venice, becomes a constant reminder of what took his daughter. The canals are not picturesque; they are threatening, opaque, hiding the same depths that claimed Christine.
Richmond and Roeg frame the city as a trap of tightening passages and repeated dead ends, so that something feels persistently wrong with the space itself. Venice is not the safe refuge the Baxters hope for but a place where their grief is amplified rather than soothed.
The Ending – Death in the Dark
The film’s final sequence is among the most famous in British cinema. John Baxter, separated from Laura and increasingly drawn to the small red-coated figure he keeps glimpsing, corners it at last in a dark, empty building, believing it to be a child, perhaps even the spirit of his daughter. The figure turns to face him. It is not a child but a dwarfish woman, who draws a blade and cuts his throat. The killer he has half-consciously pursued through the film is the one who ends his life.
As he dies, John understands the vision that has haunted him all along: the boat carrying Laura and the two black-clad sisters, which he had read as a premonition of Laura’s death, was in fact his own funeral procession. The film closes on that procession moving slowly down a Venetian canal, the image he had seen from the start without recognising it.
Du Maurier’s story ends on the same brutal reveal, and Roeg stayed close to it. What the film adds is the web of precognition around the killing. John has a gift of second sight he refuses to acknowledge, and the death he walks into has been signalled to him, and to us, throughout. He dies not at the hands of anything supernatural but because he cannot stop chasing what his grief tells him to see.
The death feels less shocking than foreordained. Roeg’s editing has been seeding John’s fate throughout, so that the ending lands as the completion of a pattern rather than a surprise. In a sense the audience has been watching him move towards this moment from the opening frames.
Legacy and Influence
Don’t Look Now won the 1974 BAFTA for Best Cinematography, for Anthony B. Richmond’s work, and was nominated for Best Film alongside five other categories. It has appeared repeatedly in Sight and Sound’s polls of the greatest films ever made. Its influence runs through the work of directors including Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan, all drawn to the way Roeg handled time, editing and colour.
The film also established Venice as a recurring setting in psychological cinema, a city where beauty and menace are inseparable. It contributed to a broader shift in how British films used location, treating place not as backdrop but as emotional architecture.
For British audiences in particular, Don’t Look Now remains a touchstone of screen culture. It demonstrated that a film could be both commercially accessible and formally radical, that audiences would follow a narrative that refused to hold their hand. Its Venice is not a place anyone would want to visit, but it is a place no one who has seen the film can forget.
Image: Canaletto’s view of the entrance to Venice’s Grand Canal, c. 1730. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
