Don't Look Now
Don't Look Now is a 1973 horror/thriller film directed by Nicolas Roeg and based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier.
John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie) are mourning the death of their daughter Christine. After moving to Venice, John starts seeing a small figure in the same kind of red raincoat his daughter was wearing when she died. Meanwhile, Venice is plagued by a series of murders.
Tropes used in Don't Look Now include:
- Adaptation Expansion: By Daphne Du Maurier's own account, she thought the film a stronger adaptation than her own novel.
- Adult Fear: Losing a child, very popular.
- Alien Geometries: Venice comes across like this, with John and Laura getting lost far too easily in places they should feel familiar with
- Blind Seer
- CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Averted; not only is it unreliable, the mud makes it unpretty!
- Creepy Child: Played with. John thinks he sees one, only he's not quite right.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: John. With a meat cleaver to the neck, no less!
- Fainting: Laura passes out at a restaurant after a blind woman claims to have seen Christine sitting between her and John, laughing.
- Gainax Ending
- Ghost City: Venice comes across as this. This isn't the sunny touristy Venice, but Venice in the off season, where everything closes early, the streets are dark and wet, and isolation sinks in effortlessly.
- Infant Immortality: Averted.
- Meaningful Background Event: Subverted. Christine Baxter drowns while wearing a red raincoat in the film's opening, and the entire film suggests that she's trying to speak with the from the beyond but it's really a midget in a red raincoat with a meat cleaver, who murders randomly.
- Mind Screw
- Psychological Horror
- Skyward Scream: John, after surfacing with his dead daughter in his arms.