One Paragraph Movie Review: Don’t Look Now

One hundred and thirteenth film: Don’t Look Now, with Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, and Venice playing the primary roles. I didn’t know a single thing about this film and went into it blind, which is clever of me to say because one of the secondary characters is a blind psychic. Just like a movie psychic (who are far more reliable than real life psychics), I had an inkling that something bad was going to happen, because the first seven-eighths of this movie is all classic 70s horror drama — priests, flashbacks, sudden zooms, a jarring soundtrack, and creepy old people. It meant that even during the seemingly benign scenes, including the four-minute sex scene that’s one of the most authentic and lovely I’ve seen on film, there’s an impending sense of ickiness. And when the ickiness is finally made manifest, it’s bloody unsettling. I may never comfortably look at Little Red Riding Hood again. You can smell Venice, carpaccio and dust in this movie, and while I can’t confidently say I enjoyed watching it, it will definitely stick in my cranial squiggles for a while. Just under three dangerous mosaics out of five.