Continuing our journey through the films that influence my dissertation, we step once more into the shadows and meet a story that asks us to look again at what haunts us — a quiet irony in a film that warns us not to look at all. If The Uninvited opens the door, Don’t Look Now lingers just inside the threshold, unsettling and magnetic in equal measure.

Released in 1973 and directed by Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now adapts a Daphne du Maurier short story and centres on something human, fragile and intricate: the partnership between Laura and John Baxter after the tragic death of their daughter. They are a couple united by grief yet divided by how they move through it. One reaches toward belief while the other remains anchored in scepticism.

Roeg gives us two people haunted not by ghosts in the usual sense, but by memory, intuition and the unbearable absence of their daughter. Laura, open and receptive, finds solace in the idea that the dead might still reach out. Her encounter with two unusual sisters, one of whom claims to see the spirit of the Baxters’ daughter, becomes a lifeline. She wants to believe, needs to believe, that connection is possible. John, meanwhile, insists on rationality, grounding himself in logic even as he glimpses things he cannot explain. Their paths run parallel, sometimes brushing and sometimes clashing, both shaped by love and loss.

What fascinates me about Don’t Look Now is the way the film lets belief and scepticism exist side by side, neither cancelled out nor fully resolved. Laura and John move through Venice carrying the same grief, yet its echoes reach each of them differently. Their experiences suggest that love and loss do not simply fade. They create traces, impressions that shape what we see and how we understand the world long after the moment has passed. Whether those traces come from within or beyond is a question the film refuses to answer, and that refusal is part of what makes it linger today.

Like many works I’m exploring in this dissertation, Don’t Look Now uses the uncanny not to frighten but to reveal how deeply we can be marked by the people we love. Laura’s openness and John’s rationality form two halves of the same haunting: the way grief moves through us, the way memory clings, the way something lost can still feel present. Their story becomes less about supernatural certainty and more about the emotional residue that refuses to settle.

In the months to come, I’ll return to Don’t Look Now and its shifting, shimmering sense of the uncanny, and how it threads intuition and memory through the fabric of the everyday. For now, what stays with me is how the film captures a haunting that isn’t confined to visions or warnings but woven into the relationship at its very centre. It suggests that love and grief leave traces we cannot easily shake loose, and that sometimes the ghost we follow is the echo of what we’re not yet ready to let go.