In Daphne du Maurier's novella it is Laura that wears a red coat, but in the film the colour is used to establish an association between Christine and the elusive figure that John keeps catching glimpses of. A prominent use of this fragmented approach to time is during the love scene, in which the scenes of John and Laura having sex are intercut with scenes of them dressing afterwards to go out to dinner. The hood slides away, and the little girl turns out to be a “little thick-set woman dwarf … grinning at him. The story is, at its core, a tale about seeing and talking with the dead, as well as about psychic visions and premonitions.

Utterson, a dull, uninquisitive and methodical lawyer who, by the novel’s end, understands the nature of his friend’s odd behavior and experiments.Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith, and Jeremy Dyson drew upon Don't Look Now considerably for their television series The League of Gentlemen; Pemberton ranks it among the top three British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s, and says that he wants things he has written to make audiences feel the way he felt when he watched The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now. This upsets John because he is convinced that something suspicious is brewing with these sisters, and that they must want something from him and Laura.

Her voice, for the first time since they had come away, took on the old bubbling quality he loved, and the worried frown between her brows had vanished. Roeg's use of colour—especially red—can be traced back to earlier work: both Performance and Walkabout feature scenes where the whole screen turns red, similar in nature to the scene during Christine's drowning when the spilt water on the church slide causes a reaction that makes it—along with the whole screen—turn completely red.

It adopts an impressionist approach to its imagery, often presaging events with familiar objects, patterns and colours using associative editing techniques. Much has been made of the fragmented editing of Don't Look Now, and in Nicolas Roeg's work in general. Daphne du Maurier’s collection Don’t Look Now, published in 1971, contains five frightening tales, including “The Birds. Laura’s eagerness to believe the twin sisters’ stories about Christine makes John uncomfortable at first and then angry later when the twins show up again at dinner.

Dying, John realises too late that the strange sightings he experienced were premonitions of his own murder and funeral. John himself is mistaken for a Peeping Tom when he follows Laura to the séance, [14] and ultimately he mistakes the mysterious red-coated figure for a child. Her grief and guilt over Christine’s death are somewhat mitigated by the thought that her child is happy and doing well, even though she is not living on Earth. The film was among the top British titles at the UK box-office in 1974, second only to Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and ranking in the top twenty of the year overall. But even an admirer of du Maurier, such as Kelly, can acknowledge that her stories may be less than perfect.

Roeg frequently drew upon the world of pop music for his work, casting Mick Jagger in Performance, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing, and in turn his films have served as inspiration for musicians. He feels “an impending sense of doom” and is unable to move, thinking, “This is the end, there is no escape, no future.

Later that day, assuming that Laura is in England, John is shocked when he spots her on a passing boat in a funeral cortege, accompanied by the sisters. The mysteries continue, even after Laura discovers that the women are simply sisters traveling together and that one is blind, which explains her failure to respond to John. Filming the scene in which John nearly falls to his death while restoring the mosaic in San Nicolò church was also beset by problems, and resulted in Donald Sutherland's life being put in danger. Laura encounters two elderly sisters, Heather and Wendy, at a restaurant where she and John are dining; Heather claims to be psychic and—despite being blind—informs Laura she is able to "see" the Baxters' deceased daughter. She had always studied the occult and similar topics, and the two sisters now keep a diary of supernatural happenings.

Shooting the sequence was particularly problematic: Sharon Williams, who played Christine, became hysterical when submersed in the pond, despite the rehearsals at the swimming pool going well. in which an estranged couple (portrayed by George Lazenby and Anita Strindberg) investigate the drowning death of their daughter. Consider what you know about the couple, and create biographies for them that include where they were born, what they studied in school, what they were like as children and young adults, and how they met. Modern Venice has struggled with physical damage from flooding, pollution, and age, as well as the loss of population to other areas. When Laura follows one of the women into the bathroom to see if she is really a he, the one left at the table stares at John but doesn’t acknowledge John’s smiles.