Don’t Look Now

Dir. Nicolas Roeg. 1973, 110 mins. Imported 35mm print. With Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie. A red-hooded coat—that fairy tale trope of Little Red Riding Hood—gains an ominous significance in Nicolas Roeg’s masterful thriller. Based on a novella by Daphne du Maurier, the film tells of a married couple coming to terms with their daughter’s accidental death by drowning. The girl’s red coat and its color become the principal indicators of mental time travel, which takes on the form of traumatic flashbacks and sinister premonitions. Roeg excels in generating multiple senses of disorientation that are temporal as well as spatial.