Don't Look Now

The film opens at the Baxters' English country home. John, an art restorer, is reviewing slides of Venetian churches in his study while his wife Laura reads upstairs and their young daughter Christine plays outside in her red plastic coat. John notices a strange red-coated figure in one of the slide images and spills a glass of water, smearing the photograph; he is seized by sudden dread, runs outside, and finds Christine drowned in the pond. He pulls her body from the water, too late.

Months later, John and Laura are in Venice, where John has been commissioned to restore a decaying church. Both are still grieving; Laura is in fragile recovery. In a restaurant they meet two elderly Scottish sisters, Heather and Wendy. Heather is blind and clairvoyant; she tells Laura that she has 'seen' Christine, sitting between the Baxters at the table, smiling. Laura is comforted; John is uneasy and dismissive.

Laura grows close to the sisters; John pours himself into the restoration. He begins to catch fleeting glimpses around Venice of a small figure in a red coat — exactly like Christine's. He chases the figure through alleys and over bridges but can never close the distance. Meanwhile a serial killer is loose in Venice, dragging bodies from the canals; the police are quietly working the case.

Laura receives word that their surviving son Johnny has had an accident at his English boarding school. She flies home; John stays to finish the church. The same evening, John glimpses Laura with the two sisters on a funeral gondola gliding through the Grand Canal. Convinced something has happened to her, he goes to the police, only to call England and find Laura unharmed at the school.

John follows the figure in the red coat one final time, into a derelict building. He corners it. The figure turns around: it is a hideous, elderly dwarf woman — the serial killer haunting Venice. She slashes his throat with a cleaver. As John dies, flashes of the funeral procession he 'saw' on the canal cut through his mind and he understands at last what he was seeing — his own funeral, his second sight running ahead of his comprehension. The film closes on Laura in the funeral gondola alongside the two sisters, dressed in black, drifting through Venice.