In the seventies, Nicolas Roeg was a phenomenon unto himself, the filmmaker as sensualist. Sounds were almost palpable, images audible, reality ever malleable in The Walkabout, Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth. So it was that he was able to capture the existential essence of Gothic in Don't Look Now, an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier tale of rationality lost amid the wet corridors of Venice. Don't Look Now is a truly frightening film, reminiscent in its way of the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur horror-noirs in being so rooted in sensual realism, then recreating the pain of two diehard materialists as they are lured into the swampy world of the intangible. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are a London couple whose lives are shattered by the drowning death of their young daughter. In Venice, where he is restoring a cathedral, she encounters two weird sisters who claim to have spoken to their dead daughter, drawing them into an agonizing web of resurrected possibilities. Sutherland seems completely in sync with what Roeg is trying to do here; his rendition of John Baxter is one of quiet pain, from the first moment of joy that somehow knows itself to be short-lived, to the silent image of the father pulling his drowned daughter up from the blue, to the moment when he surrenders his existential humanity to the unknown which haunts him.