cult film freak: DONALD SUTHERLAND AND JULIE CHRISTIE IN 'DON'T LOOK NOW'

Title: DON'T LOOK NOW Year: 1973 Rating: ****

Never let your young daughter play outside, around water... and if she plays with dolls, why a windup military man with a gas mask? That aside, caution is the pulse to Nicolas Roeg's eerie/offbeat thriller DON'T LOOK NOW set in Venice where marrieds Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie deal with their daughter's prologue-drowning a few years prior...

And while Christie is always great, the mainline is Sutherland's John Baxter, restoring the antique ruins of a Catholic church and, not religious, he cares more about the significance of religious art than priest Massimo Serato...

Donald Sutherland in DON'T LOOK NOW

As the best scenes involve Sutherland's dark, brooding journey into the ancient city of channels surrounded by antique buildings while indoors, the (in)famous overlong sex scene feels like director Roeg finishing an unrealized racy student film, less important than what we're really after...

Julie Christie's haunted Laura is more in touch with her deceased child because of blue-eyed Hilary Mason, a blind seer led around by a talky sister: But Sutherland's as close-minded to that concept as the priest is to the restoration...

Hilary Mason, Julie Christie and Clelia Matania in DON'T LOOK NOW

Meanwhile, the second half gets into a kind of Alfred Hitchcock-inspired Neo Noir investigation, with detective Renato Scarpa asking those subtle, pointed questions...

Leaving the scariest sequence till the end, and you'll know where THE BROOD children came from after witnessing the most nightmarish of nightmarish female demon dwarfs in an eclectic, arthouse horror that, while all over the place textually, does have a destination... just as long as you know who to follow. And what's following them.