Don’t Look Now” draws on this convention of the logical protagonist in its depiction of John who, like Walton, Utterson, and Seward, finds his unshakable faith in logic and reason tested, and eventually broken, by the story’s end. Du Maurier's story actually opens in Venice following Christine's death from meningitis, but the decision was taken to change the cause of death to drowning and to include a prologue to exploit the water motif.

For centuries the gondola, a flat-bottomed boat propelled by a single oar, provided most transportation. Christie commented that "people didn't do scenes like that in those days", and that she found the scenes difficult to film: "There were no available examples, no role models .Thematic and narrative similarities with Lars von Trier's Antichrist have also been observed, [80] with Antichrist's cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, commenting that he has watched Don't Look Now more times than any other film. When the collection entitled Don’t Look Now came out in 1971, Margaret Millar reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review. She is all organization and purpose, arranging for John’s later departure and watching over the porter who has been assigned to find her a seat on a plane. Although he mocks the sisters’ explanation of his own psychic powers (imagining them visiting he and Laura in England and holding “a seance in the living-room, tambourines appearing out of thin air”), he leaves their hotel in a hurry once the blind one falls into her trance. The boat is moving down the Grand Canal, “not today, not tomorrow, but the day after that, and he knew why they were together and for what purpose they had come.

Roeg frequently drew upon the world of pop music for his work, casting Mick Jagger in Performance, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing, and in turn his films have served as inspiration for musicians. As he later tries to make sense of his seeing Laura on the canal boat, John tries to make the way in which his wife approaches her grief more like his own. She is forgiving, and although she is upset that John has accused her and her sister of some wrongdoing in the case of Laura’s disappearance, she accepts John’s apology and has no intention of filing a complaint against him. She uses foreshadowing to indicate that trouble is coming soon, such as when John sees what he thinks is a small child wearing a hooded jacket fleeing danger through the streets and jumping from boat to boat across the canal.Du Maurier’s world does not ask much introspection of readers, only that they come along for the ride.

Variety considered Sutherland to be at his most subdued but also at his most effective, while Christie does her "best work in ages". He and Laura, his wife, create wild scenarios to describe the sisters and their possible business in Torcello. Roeg served as the cinematographer on Petulia, which incidentally also starred Julie Christie, and Gibbs went on to edit Performance and Walkabout for Roeg. Sutherland ended up doing it instead, and was attached to a kirby wire as a precaution in case he should fall. John hears police outside the door, but the dwarf throws a knife at him, which sticks in his throat.While many changes were due to the logistics of filming in Venice, some were for creative reasons, the most prominent being the inclusion of the love scene. The concept of Doppelgänger and duplicates feature prominently in the film: reproductions are a constantly recurring motif ranging from reflections in the water, to photographs, to police sketches and the photographic slides of the church John is restoring. It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. He is suspicious that either the sisters are following them or Laura told them where they would be eating that night. Later at the hotel, the police show up to take John to the station, where they are holding the twin sisters for questioning.

Shooting the sequence was particularly problematic: Sharon Williams, who played Christine, became hysterical when submersed in the pond, despite the rehearsals at the swimming pool going well. Don't Look Now was produced through London-based Casey Productions and Rome-based Eldorado Films, by producer Peter Katz and executive producer Anthony B. After John apologizes for implicating the sisters in his wife’s apparent disappearance, they explain that when he saw Laura with them on the boat he was probably experiencing a premonition. For example, in Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelly’s novel of the “modern Prometheus,” Frankenstein tells his story to Robert Walton, an explorer and seeker of “knowledge and wisdom” who eventually accepts the “strange and terrific” story of how Frankenstein reanimated dead tissue.Laura’s eagerness to believe the twin sisters’ stories about Christine makes John uncomfortable at first and then angry later when the twins show up again at dinner. Cocks felt that thanks to their superb performances the film had a "rigorous psychological truth and an emotional timbre" that most other films in the supernatural genre lacked.