(1973) At St Nicholas Church, where her husband John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is in charge of repairs, Laura (Julie Christie) encounters the two English sisters, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania), again, whom she'd met the previous day in a restaurant where, after helping Wendy remove a speck from her eye, she'd fainted, knocking over the table where she and John were dining. In the women's lavatory, Heather, blind but with second sight, told Laura of seeing her little daughter Christine, wearing a red mac and laughing, sitting between her and John.

Months earlier Christine had drowned in the pond behind their home in England. Laura explains to the pair of older women the circumstances of the tragedy in which John had suddenly rushed outside "almost as if he knew something was going to happen." Heather says that John, too, "has the gift."

Desperate to make contact with her dead daughter, Laura begs the psychic to assist; Heather disparages the mumbo-jumbo of holding hands for calling forth ectoplasm from spiritual rest "for our entertainment." Laura pleads with John, skeptical and worried about her state of mind: "She's trying to get in touch with us." In the sisters' room, Laura watches Heather enter a fitful trance (interposed with scene of John trying to escape from something) before receiving a warning (from Christine) that John's "life is in danger in Venice."

A phone call from London informs the Baxters of an accident involving their son Johnny; Laura leaves on a flight to be with her son; an accident in the church nearly costs John his life. Afterward, taking a walk, accompanied by Bishop Barbarrigo (Massimo Serato), who says his own father died from a fall, John witnesses a female's corpse raised from the water, another victim of a recent spate of homicides.

Director Nicolas Roeg's murder mystery - full of murky atmospherics, scattered symbols (one of the candles Laura has lit in a church, the same as the photographic slide of its stained-glass windows on which John had cut his finger just prior to Christine's death, blows out as she and John depart) in a "city in aspic," crumbling from the corruption of its polluted air, and diminutive denouement - is based on a story by Daphne du Maurier.

The steamy love-making scene, juxtaposed with the couple's getting dressed to go out for dinner, is the Freudian Eros preceding Thanatos. Riding on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal, John thinks he sees Laura, dressed in black, standing beside the two sisters; suspecting his wife to be in danger, he reports his misgivings to the police.

At the bishop's residence, John places a call to London where he's surprised to hear his wife's voice, assuring him that their son is well and that she will be returning on a flight later in the day. At the police station John apologizes to Heather, who along with her sister had been arrested on his suspicions; he walks the blind woman back to her hotel where they find Wendy just returned from a visit with the British counsel. Soon after John departs and Laura arrives, Heather cries out from another trance: "You must find him! Warn him!"

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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