This month marks 50 years since the release of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a personal touchstone movie (adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier) that is at once an occult chiller, a poignant portrait of married love, a heartfelt meditation on grief and a shaggy dog story with a grisly sting in its tail. The anniversary offers film fans an excuse to dust off this classic, alongside other hallowed 1973 movies such as Enter the Dragon, The Exorcist and The Wicker Man, which was originally the supporting feature for Don’t Look Now (how’s that for a double bill). It also allows me to kick off my new column, focusing each month on a different director, with a few thoughts on Nicolas Roeg, the great British director who once told me that time was “lateral rather than linear”, rendering the very concept of anniversaries irrelevant.
In Roeg’s films, which range from the galaxy-traversing sci-fi of The Man Who Fell to Earth to the imagined Einstein/Monroe relativity of Insignificance, time is fluid – a mysterious memory pool where past, present and future collide. It’s no coincidence that Roeg’s most notorious film (which I’ve introduced on BFI Player) was a non-linear, flashbacked psychodrama from 1980, tellingly titled Bad Timing.
