"There is a point in every gifted film-maker’s career where you’d like to stop the clock. The late Nicolas Roeg never surpassed this mesmerising mosaic of a movie, made in 1973 from a Daphne du Maurier story. The strengths of cinema as an art — agility with time, the trompe l’oeil deceptions underlying apparent reality — are used to make us doubt our senses, just as the story’s central couple do theirs.
"In a hallucinatory Venice, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie keep seeing, or think they do, their lately drowned daughter. A red hood, a scurrying figure . . . is it her? Or is it their distorting memory, turning malign as the tale grows?
"No director better captured this city of shifting, rippling shadows and distorting-mirror canals. Roeg’s Venice is a place with unstable anchorage in modern reality. Past and present interact. Who is observing whom in the movie’s maze of voyeurism? There is not just the quirky, creepy pair of old ladies who seem to stalk the young couple. There are the paintings, monuments and historied sites that judge those presumptuous enough to judge, appraise and try to renew them.
"Screenwriter Allan Scott — whose main career was as a whisky company executive, proving that single malts are truly mind-altering — worked for Roeg again, but never to this pitch of achievement. Themes of perception and obsession, continuity and ephemerality thread the film: as glistening, sinuous and life-giving as Venice’s own waterways." - The Financial Times
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