Plot
Some time after the drowning of their young daughter, Christine (Sharon Williams), in a tragic accident at their English country home, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife, Laura (Julie Christie), take a trip to Venice after John accepts a commission from a bishop (Massimo Serato) to restore an ancient church. Laura encounters two elderly sisters, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania), 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. Shaken, Laura returns to her table, where she faints.
Laura is taken to the hospital, where she later tells John what Heather told her. John is sceptical but pleasantly surprised by the positive change in Laura's demeanour. Later in the evening after returning from the hospital, John and Laura engage in passionate sexual intercourse. Afterwards, they go out to dinner where they get lost and briefly become separated. John catches a glimpse of what looks like a small child (Adelina Poerio) wearing a red coat similar to the one Christine was wearing when she died.
The next day, Laura meets with Heather and Wendy, who hold a séance to try to contact Christine. When she returns to the hotel Laura informs John that Christine has said he is in danger and must leave Venice. John loses his temper with Laura, but that night they receive a telephone call informing them that their son (Nicholas Salter) has been injured in an accident. Laura departs for England, while John stays on to complete the restoration. Under the assumption that Laura is in England, John is shocked when later that day he spots her on a barge that is part of a funeral cortege, accompanied by the two sisters. Concerned about his wife's mental state and with reports of a serial killer at large in Venice, he reports Laura's disappearance to the police. The inspector (Renato Scarpa) investigating the killings, is suspicious of John and has him followed.
After conducting a futile search for Laura and the sisters—in which he again sees the childlike figure in the red coat—John contacts his son's boarding school to enquire about his condition, only to discover Laura is already at the school. After speaking to her to confirm she really is in England, a bewildered John returns to the police station to inform the police he has found his wife. In the meantime the police have brought Heather in for questioning, so an apologetic John offers to escort her back to the hotel.
Shortly after returning, John catches another glimpse of the mysterious figure in red as he is leaving Heather's hotel, and this time pursues it. Meanwhile, Heather has slipped into a trance and upon coming out of it beseeches her sister to go after John, sensing that something terrible is about to happen, but Wendy is unable to catch up with him. John follows the elusive figure to a deserted palazzo, and having cornered it, realises too late that the strange sightings he has been experiencing were premonitions of his own death.
Read more about this topic: Don't Look Now
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)