Great understated horror is rare in movies. It takes an eye that can find something unsettling in the mundane. Typically, it deals with people who are in a horrific (and believable) place mentally or emotionally, as opposed to a “trapped in a haunted house” scenario. It slowly, painstakingly builds up to shocking moments and unleashes them only when the tension runs so hot that the screen is about to go up in flames, as opposed to merely sinking an axe into someone’s head every time there’s a lull in the plot. It’s often ambiguous or, at the very least, it trusts its audience to get the point. It usually takes strong actors and a director who has a razor-sharp sense of irony.
It takes next-level skills, in other words. The kind that Nicolas Roeg wields in this brilliant film, adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier.
I don’t want to reveal too much about what happens, but I can say that Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are a well-to-do couple whose daughter drowns one day in the pond behind their house. Fast forward a few years when Sutherland and Christie have gone back to something resembles normalcy after their loss. Obviously, they’re never going to completely get over the grief, but they are bantering together, enjoying each other’s company and are well into the process of picking up the pieces.
Then in Venice, Italy–where Sutherland has taken a job supervising the restoration of a centuries-old church–Christie has a chance meeting with an elderly blind woman who claims to be a psychic and who sees their dead daughter still at their side in spirit. Christie wants to find out more and things get real screwy from there.
Three things that I love about this film:
Uno: It keeps the supernatural elements murky and mysterious and, thus, more creepy. We don’t see any ghost special effects. We never trust the psychic completely. This movie allows us to be skeptical. There is convincing evidence that all of this malarky is true, but it’s also grounded in a real world logic that gives you room for doubt. We don’t know where we, or anyone else, stand in this film’s world.
Dos: It’s always interesting to me when films lay a lot of untranslated foreign language on us. John Huston did it in one of the most memorable scenes in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Ida Lupino did it in The Hitch-Hiker. Nicolas Roeg does it here, too. He punctuates some scenes with characters speaking Italian–no subtitles, no English speakers around to react–and it makes us feel like we’re missing something (though I guess that effect is lost if you’re fluent in Italian). Sometimes, filmmakers do that as a challenge in visual storytelling. Even if we don’t know exactly what everyone is saying, we still know what happened. For Roeg though, it’s about disorientation. This film is a plunge into mystery. No one we trust knows anything. Come to think of it, we’re not even sure who we trust.
Tres: Roeg treats this like it’s just much a drama as it is a horror story. It’s about grief. It’s also about how people don’t always know themselves as well they think they do.
This is a top-shelf classic. Roeg had just made Walkabout and he had The Man Who Fell to Earth coming up after this. He was on fire during this time.