Fleapit revisited:Don't Look Now.

"It's like a city in aspic. Left over from a dinner party and all the guests are dead and gone. Too many shadows. We're almost there" - Heather

Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now (adapted from a Daphne du Maurier story and shown recently on BBC1 - presumably due to Hallowe'en, while still being available on iPlayer) is rightly regarded as something of a horror, or thriller, classic. I'd seen it, for the first time, about twenty years ago in a cinema in the West End of London and it thoroughly chilled me.

It scared the shit out of me. But watching at home, especially when I already know what's going to happen, could it possibly have the same effect? More or less, yes. It still felt incredibly eerie, it was still chilling, and it still made me jump. The final ten minutes or so were just as brilliant as I'd remembered them - and I hadn't even remembered them correctly!

The film begins in a large idyllic English country garden. A child, Christine (Sharon Williams), dressed in a bright red coat is playing on the edge of a lake with a ball and a talking Action Man. She is the daughter of John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) and soon she will fall in the lake and drown. Changing, it seems, John and Laura's life forever.

That all happens in the first six minutes of the film. We next meet up with John and Laura at some unspecified time in the future. Still grieving, they've moved to Venice (a masterclass in peeling paint and faded glamour if that's your thing, it is mine) where John has accepted a commission from Bishop Barbarrigo (Massimo Serato) to restore an ancient church.

While dining out, Laura meets with two peculiar sisters:- Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather (Hilary Mason). Heather is blind but she can, she and Wendy claim, "see" in other ways. She is psychic and she certainly seems to know enough detail about Laura's daughter and her untimely death to convince Laura of her powers.

This, once Laura has fainted, provides comfort to Laura and though John is far more skeptical he is pleased, at least initially, that his wife is finally starting to feel a little bit better. But when Heather and Wendy invite Laura to a seance in which they hope to contact Christine, it becomes apparent, if they are to be believed - and there are plenty of reasons to both believe and not believe them, that John himself is in danger.

When Laura returns to England after her son, Johnny (Nicholas Salter), has an accident at his boarding school, John is left in Venice alone and things, for him, start to get very weird. Strange noises, labyrinthine backstreets, incidences of deja vu, Christian imagery, dolls, grotesque statues, a loose serial killer, canals (of course), vaporettos, and Heather and Wendy appearing almost everywhere.

What is happening to John? What is happening in Venice? Roeg doesn't make it easy for us. Don't Look Now involves cuts that jump backwards and forwards in time, split screens, scenes filmed upside down as if reflected in water, and lots and lots of symbolism. There's also THAT infamous sex scene between Sutherland and Christie and a moment where the sound of a piercing scream merges almost seemlessly into that of an equally piercing drill.

More than anything there is red. I hadn't noticed, first time round, quite how much. There is, of course, the red of Christine's coat but there is also the red of a pair of boots, the red of a dressing gown, the red of a VW Beetle, the red of a sign reading VENICE IN PERIL (!), and even the red of an advert for Fanta. Most of all there is the red of another quite startling outfit seen towards the end of the film and, even more than that, the red of blood that is mostly hinted at but never feels far from coming to the surface.

As Pino Donaggio's score constantly hits just the right note of menace and uncertainty, we see both John and Laura pound the night streets of Venice hoping to solve their own different mysteries while also resolving their shared grief. Will Laura's new found belief in the paranormal provide her with any solace in the face of an unimaginable loss or will John's rational quest for answers help him? You'll have to wait until the very end to find out.