The red coat flickers through fog-drenched canals. A child’s shape, glimpsed and lost. Nicolas Roeg opens Don’t Look Now with a drowning and never quite lets you breathe again.

Based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story and adapted by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, the film follows John and Laura Baxter — Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie — to Venice, where John has taken a commission to restore a crumbling church. The city is off-season, waterlogged, half-emptied of its usual life. Roeg makes it feel like a place grief has moved into permanently: crooked alleys that go nowhere, vaporetti carrying strangers past in silence, canals the colour of dark glass. Venice here is not picturesque. It’s a place where a man might genuinely lose his mind.

The grief they carry is the death of their daughter Christine. Sutherland plays John as someone who has decided not to feel it — a rational man, professionally absorbed, quietly terrified of anything he cannot explain. Christie’s Laura takes the opposite path. She lets the wound stay open. When two elderly sisters — Heather, the blind clairvoyant played with unnerving stillness by Hilary Mason, and her companion Wendy — tell Laura that Christine is trying to reach them from beyond, she doesn’t resist. She collapses into the possibility. The two performances fit together with uncomfortable precision: his skepticism and her belief pulling at each other like opposite ends of a rope that’s starting to fray.

Roeg’s editing is the film’s real protagonist. He treats time as something porous — past and present bleed into each other, images from the future drift into the present tense — and the accumulation of red, Christine’s coat dispersed across the film in different objects and surfaces, works less as symbolism than as ambient dread. You start to notice it before you can say why. The structure mirrors grief’s actual texture: trauma folds back on itself rather than moving forward in any clean line.

The séance scene is the pivot. Heather relays Christine’s message — John is in danger, he must leave Venice — and Christie receives it with an expression that holds belief and terror at once. It is among the finest work she has done on screen. Quiet by horror standards. No atmospheric score, no tricks of light. Just a blind woman speaking and a mother trying to hold herself together.

Then there is the sex scene, still one of cinema’s most discussed editorial achievements. Roeg intercuts John and Laura’s lovemaking with their dressing afterward — not as flashback or flash-forward in any conventional sense but as a kind of temporal doubling, passion and its aftermath occupying the same moment. The sequence communicates something true about intimacy after catastrophic loss: how the body insists on being alive when part of you no longer wants it to.

Where the film stumbles is in its thriller machinery. The serial-killer subplot — a figure preying on Venice’s streets — never integrates into the emotional core. It runs alongside the supernatural material without touching it, and the climax, though genuinely shocking, tips slightly into the contrived. Some sequences in the second half feel like they’re pulling toward a momentum the film has already spent.

Bearded, moving through restoration scaffolding with a kind of battered authority, Sutherland is at his best when paranoia is doing its quiet work on him — the small hesitations, the stare held a beat too long. Christie gives the film its emotional spine. Hilary Mason’s Heather is genuinely unsettling precisely because she plays the role without theatrical excess, and Renato Scarpa’s inspector brings a dry institutional suspicion that keeps John perpetually off-balance.

Fifty years on, Don’t Look Now has not aged into something comfortable. It remains unsettling in the way that certain dreams are — not because of what it shows but because of what it withholds.