Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is visual masterpiece. It is simply mesmerizing in its nuanced artistry. But what is all this artistry in service of? I have come to the conclusion that although the film seems to want to make grandiose statements about life, synchronicity, and the human condition, it is best experienced as a straight horror film. If you don’t expect more than a horror film, this movie is very enjoyable.

But with that said … WHAT a horror film!!! Watching a film like this makes you realize just how far things have slipped in the film making business. Visually there has been nothing close to this for decades, not among mainstream movies with big-name stars in them like Donald Sutherland and Julie Cristie in their primes.  The opening scene is the greatest horror opening of all time; the child’s death and the sequence of events that happen to the couple as they cope is so sad and beautiful I cried several times. The simultaneous tension and meditative splendor of this film, conveyed in every aspect of its making – casting, writing, acting, editing, cinematography – is unmatched in the history of the horror genera. It is pointless for me to try to put it onto words – it has to be experienced.

But let’s just take a simple example. Has a city ever been captured the way Venice was captured in this film? And has Venice ever looked so sad, so humbly and majestically moribund? It’s not just the locations in Venice chosen for filming. It’s the angles it is filmed at, the way the light and sound are captured, the way the different shots are sequenced. It is absolutely exquisite. It is like he captured the transience of life itself, and more importantly the emotion connected to that transience, simply in the way the location was shot. It’s marvelous.

As for the famous love-making seen, it deserves its fame. There is a moment at the beginning of it where … well it’s rather hard to capture the full power of the scene in words because there are aspects that simply must to experience visually, but suffice it to say that Roeg manages to convey, in a single Donald Sutherland expression, the fact that the couple has not made love since their daughter died, and convey the complex grief and loneliness he is feeling, even though nothing up to this point has clued us in to this fact. It is breath-taking, and is an example of the kind of exquisite film making that you just don’t see in modern films. No one could do this now; they would have to put it into dialog, or into some clumsy action (the character pulls away,) or worse have a narrator tell us.

And by the way, it is some of the most passionate and real looking love-making I can remember in film. This isn’t a modern American movie where botoxed actors make love with their clothes on. It’s real, raw, and beautiful.

I don’t know what else to say about the film, except that it moves in slow, graceful steps and the ending is simply overwhelming in it’s simultaneous grandure and humility. It’s probably among the greatest horror film endings of all time.