Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Don't Look Now and Other Stories

PS, 10/7/23: I saw the Nicholas Roeg film adaptation last night with some family members. One thought it was too slow, another thought it was brilliant but slower than it had to be, and I just thought it was brilliant. Perfectly paced! Begins slowly, sure, but it builds! The ending sequence is amazing, just breathtaking. The (very bright) color red throughout the otherwise rather muted Venice kind of gives the sense of haunting in so many ways. The buildings, the public artwork, crumbling from humidity, as the Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie characters are haunted by their grief. The psychic dimensions of the film are chilling. An unsettling film with much beauty in it, much to talk about.

Original review: I have been reading/re-reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, vaguely connected to a ghost lit course I am teaching and, well, it's approaching Halloween month, and I saw there was an audio version of her "Don't Look Now," a short story I had never read, though I saw the 1973 (and saw it in 1973!) film adaptation by Nicholas Roeg, (with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) that frightened me, so I read it and liked it very much. I'm alone here in the house, and . . . what was that noise. . .? Who can be on my back porch at this time of the evening?! Why is the damned light bulb suddenly burned out?

In Don’t Look Now, a married couple, John and Laura, holiday in Venice, recovering from the death of their daughter [in the short story she had recently died of meningitis; in the film she dies at the opening of the film by drowning]. They are in grief, but John is hoping they can in some ways use the holiday to "get over" this dark period. His wife Laura is in shaky emotional shape, unsurprisingly. He wants to get it behind him, handling grief a little differently. [In the film, John, an art historian, is assisting with the restoration of a church as well as being accompanied by his wife as an escape from England for a time].

In a restaurant, two older women approach Laura to say they had a vision of a girl--the couple's daughter--behind them. One of the women, blind, claims psychic capacities that John is skeptical about, especially since she claims that the dead daughter is warning them of the dangers of Venice now, since a murderer is still at large. John is also especially annoyed by the blind woman since she feels he has psychic capacities himself. He thinks this is ridiculous, but the blind woman insists they must get out of Venice as soon as possible, as one of them may come to harm. [In the film John realizes from the first that he has some kind of prescience, but seems in denial about it]. This makes John angry and upset, but within hours they receive word that their son, in a boarding school, has fallen ill. Maybe this is connected to the old women's warning? They agree to go back home, Laura immediately, John the next day.

Then some things happen I won't reveal, but the ending I recall from the film, one of the best endings of a film I can recall, just as good as in the original text. So this is a horror story--one dabbling in the occult, and/or psychic powers, that is also, in part, like My Cousin Rachel, founded in grief. But I mean, come on, Daphne, why pile on more emotional trouble on a couple grieving their lost daughter?! And on us, too! I suppose it's just to see if we can take it? Powerful, scary, intimate, accomplished.

PS: Laura in the short story and film seems comforted, even relieved, by the blind psychic's report of her daughter, though she seems to have no psychic capacity at all. Her skeptical husband, however, has from the first some prescience about his daughter, and should have acknowledged the dangers he was aware of going forward.

PPS: The title of the story has to do with something John says when he sees the two women looking at and whispering about them: "Don't look now. . ." but in Roeg's film he never sys this, though the idea of vision is deepened and enhanced. You may be seeing the color red everywhere after seeing this film. In the film--not the story--the daughter is wearing a red raincoat or slicker, so it is everywhere in the film subsequent to that, mentioned by no one.