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There are many ways of considering British-born (in 1928) director Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, one of the best films ever made in any genre in any era. Most obviously it is a brilliant and deeply tragic thriller. Based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, who provided Hitchcock with Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds, Don't Look Now delves ever so slightly into the supernatural as a father (Donald Sutherland) working on a church restoration in Venice, where much of the film was shot, suddenly appears to catch a glimpse of his recently drowned daughter. Eventually, he will pursue this vision throughout the labyrinthine Venetian streets. His wife Laura (Julie Christie) has come upon their dead daughter in a different way, via the vision of a blind, elderly Englishwoman (Hilary Mason) encountered in a Venetian restaurant. The interactions between these two types of "sightings" produce much of Don't Look Now's narrative.

Don't Look Now is also a virtuoso work. The film is a visual feast. Partially photographed by Roeg himself, who served as director of photography on such films as Dr. Zhivago, Petulia, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Fahrenheit 451—not to mention Performance (1970), which he co-directed, and Walkabout (1971), his first solo directorial effort—Don't Look Now offers a nonstop succession of one richly composed and creatively lit shot after the other. Further, although expertly communicated in Allan Scott and Chris Bryant's screenplay, the film's deepest levels of expression often take place in purely visual terms, with matched or rhyming shots popping up throughout. Roeg in fact uses editing not only to give the film a very distinct rhythm but also to tie into the breakdown of space and time that is an essential element on all levels of Don't Look Now. The six-and-one-half-minute post-title sequence, showing the daughter's drowning, contains 100 separate shots, some of them lasting less than a second, and I suspect that the climactic sequence comes close to this mark. Roeg also constantly uses the color red to link together many of the disparate elements of John's eerie wanderings into the underworld.

But this is no empty virtuosity. The impact of Don't Look Now extends miles beyond the usual ups and downs of the thriller. The film is steeped in the imagery and iconography of Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. The daughter's name is Christine, the father's name is John (the Baptist). Not only do we get an image of John arising from the pond with Christine's body in his arms, the film is thoroughly dominated by images of water, both on the micro-level (dripping bottles, for instance) and the macro-level (Venice, rain, etc.). But, fascinatingly, Don't Look Now ties, on the narrative level, the Christian element into what is perhaps the ur-myth of modernist culture, the Orpheus story. A gender opposition gets set up here, with Laura accepting an inner vision that is sometimes brutally rejected by John, who instead gets caught up chasing a figure in the outside world. Roeg's idiosyncratic takes on sexuality and gender, from Walkabout through Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession in particular, also manifest themselves here in the various linkings of mother, daughter, and the mysterious figure of a little girl in red.

The film's title is also, however, a caution. At the brink of achieving the Orphic goal, John also makes the tragic Orphic error of looking at his apparently regained daughter. The classic punishment, of course, is that at this moment Orpheus loses Eurydice forever. Here, however, Roeg interposes yet another myth, one that stands in direct opposition to the Orpheus myth: the face that John finally looks upon, in a subtle but extremely unsettling moment, is not that of his lost daughter but rather that of Medusa, the face of death, resulting in a second, extremely ugly death scene that has many cinematic parallels with the first. In this dark and disquieting clash between two myths, between what might be called the modern and the premodern, the audience finds itself immersed, thanks to both the cinematic style and to the brilliant manipulation of du Maurier's narrative, in a metaphysical netherworld with no clear temporal or spatial boundaries.

The above barely hints at the amazingly multiplicity of Don't Look Now's seemingly endless surfaces. Fortunately, the DVD transfer, which offers the film for the first time in its proper aspect ratio, is well nigh perfect. The rich color balances maintain Roeg's well planned codings and yet are stunningly natural. Both interiors and exteriors are reproduced with a fidelity that strongly recalls the theatrical experience. Forgive the hyperbole, but this DVD is one for the ages.

- Royal S. Brown