Don't Look Now: What Does The Ending Really Mean?

3. The Death

Christine's death itself feels almost premeditated, unavoidable in its sheer accidental tragedy, then made all the more suspicious by how quickly it happened and how little anyone could help. Considering yellow is the normal colour for a raincoat, that Christine's is red feels especially pertinent: the colour of passion, blood, and of course, danger.

Don't Look Now from this moment onwards shifts into supernatural territory, showing a strange figure in red appearing and disappearing at will throughout the watery walkways of Venice. This is interpreted as Christine's ghost, who communicates with Heather that there's a great danger for John in Venice, resulting in those around him trying in vain to get him out of the country.

Eventually though, instead of his lost daughter, it's revealed that a strange, small woman is the owner of the mac. She even shakes her head in a violent no when John finds her, her telling him how wrong his assumptions have been that she was his daughter before driving an axe into his throat. She's the serial killer that has been rumoured to be stalking the canals of the country and he's found her out in some self-fulfilling prophecy that has driven him to his own death.

Of course, this woman is wearing the same coat he's seen throughout the film and is the culmination of the danger he's been rumoured to be in since arriving. It begs the question: was Christine's death just a random accident, or was it a physical manifestation of the warning John has been signposted for potentially his whole life?