10 Greatest Movies About Death
9. Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg's masterful 1973 horror film Don't Look Now casts Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple grieving the accidental drowning death of their young daughter.
The pair travel to Venice where they're told that their late daughter is attempting to contact them, and though this could very well have laid the foundations for an incredibly typical supernatural horror flick, Roeg has no interest whatsoever in conventionality.
Though Don't Look Now does indeed tout a significant otherworldly component, its primary focus is on grief and the effect that bereavement has on a person's psyche.
Sutherland and Christie are astonishingly persuasive as the embattled couple, while Roeg's bravura direction, employing non-linear editing to bewilderingly ambitious effect, creates a haunting, overpowering mood throughout.
It all comes to a head, of course, with one of the most shocking endings in film history, ingeniously pulling the narrative's more surreal elements together into a spectacular, dread-infused finale.