Don’t Look Now

A red-hooded coat – that fairy-tale trope of the Little Red Riding Hood – gains an ominous significance in Nicolas Roeg’s masterful ‘nothing-is-as-it-seems’ thriller. Based on a novella by Daphne du Maurier, the film tells a story of a married couple who are coming to terms with their daughter’s accidental death by drowning. The girl’s coat – a patent red mac – and, by extension, its colour of blood, become the principal indicators of mental time travel, which takes on the form of traumatic flashbacks into the past and sinister premonitions of the future. Don’t Look Now excels in generating a multiple sense of disorientation: temporal, visual and spatial. It is a film that demands more than one viewing.