Summary
After suffering a family tragedy, a British couple living in Venice are confronted by a series of mysterious and perhaps paranormal events.
My Thoughts
This movie reminded me a lot of the film “Hereditary.” I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that just as Ari Aster drew on “The Wicker Man” when creating “Midsommar,”so did he draw on “Don’t Look Now” when writing “Hereditary.”
This movie opens with a scene depicting John (Donald Sutherland, “Fallen”) and Laura’s daughter drowning in the back yard of their estate. It is very creatively done and a foreshadow of the way that Nicolas Roeg (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”) will handle much of the paranormal elements of this film. We never actually see her fall in, hear her fall in, and nothing happens to even alert her mother as to the trouble. However, John gets a sense that something is wrong when blood seems to appear on one of the slides he is looking at through a projector. He follows his instinct and runs outside but he is too late to save his daughter.
This scene sets the stage perfectly for the film by establishing life and death stakes, the existence of the paranormal, and the separation between John and Laura, the main couple in the film, as Laura has no idea anything is even happening till it is all over, or does she.
The rest of the movie picks up some weeks or months later with John and Laura (Julie Christie, “Doctor Zhivago”) in Venice where John is working on the restoration of a church. It is here among the decay of a crumbling city that the rest of the film will play out.
Laura and John each try to deal with the loss of their daughter in their own ways, throwing themselves into work, seeking comfort in each other, and consulting with priests and psychics. Through it all, there is an overwhelming feeling of dread. Sometimes it feels like the loss of their daughter is hovering over them and blanketing them with sadness or paranoia but at other times it seems that John especially is in terrible danger from some force or another trying to kill him.
If you are the sort of person that wants the plot to be neatly wrapped up and every loose end tied neatly back and tucked into the whole then you will not like this movie. Very few answers are offered. The film is far more concerned with creating and atmosphere of confusion and decay. Luckily, it does this expertly.
I suppose I am guessing a little here but it seems like Roeg is trying to link this confusion and crumbling city facade to the pain of losing a child and the absolute gut ripping that experience must be. In this, I find the movie to be unsuccessful. While the individual parts are done well and certainly the atmosphere established almost perfectly it is the failure to connect these emotions to ideas or experiences that are larger than the film that keeps it from being a masterpiece in my eyes.
Certainly, if you just want an atmospheric horror film then you can’t go wrong here. If what you want is a film that points you to some other inner reality or meaning then I‘m afraid you might be disappointed.
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