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

1. The End

The end of the film, then, is the culmination of all these moments that have been seeded throughout to show John's death. His brilliantly red blood spills on the cobblestones of Venice's old stone work, and his wife, Wendy, and Heather ride on a funeral boat across the canals in a moment of finality to his story. It's the same image that he had had a vision of earlier in the movie when reporting his wife as missing to the police, confused by his prescience into believing she was still in Venice rather than at home with their son.

It's an amalgamation of the future and the past that's impossible to read for the untrained psychic John as it tumbles around him.

We can also look at his face off with the dwarf as an interpretation of the Baxter grief, and how John's refusal to accept or deal with the loss of his daughter personally came back to bite him at the end of the film. He spends all his time running after what he believes to be Christine and never taking steps to actually deal with the anguish thrust upon him. Where Laura finds a comforting way to deal with her emotions, no matter how healthy it actually is, John spends his time refusing to open up. That he takes a job in the most water-ridden country possible seems like self-flagellation and a closing off to his emotional needs to surround himself with images of death that he never actually processes.

To chase the last residual image of her and find out that it is death itself for him is poetic, the overwhelming feeling of his grief taking over at long last and spilling out with the last of his blood. If we consider that the serial killer had previously only killed women by drowning, that John dies by a sharp instrument feels all the more poignant as the break in that cycle, and reminiscent of John's own break in the cycle of his distance from his own emotions.