Julianne Moore’s favourite thriller movie: “Maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever seen”
Julianne Moore has appeared in nearly every genre and worked with some of the greatest directors of all time. She’s starred in a soap opera, won an Oscar (for Still Alice in 2015), and been attacked by dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise. She’s played miserable housewives and top-billed pornstars, scientists, politicians, and evil witches. There seems to be no end to her actorly toolbox, which is why she’s been one of the go-to choices for directors who can work with anyone they want.
Consider her list of collaborators. Pedro Almodovar, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen brothers, and Steven Spielberg are directors with whom many actors would give their right arm to work. Like Meryl Streep, Moore is a filmmaker’s actor, a performer who will always elevate a project, no matter how good (or bad) it was to begin with. She has the ability to make characters feel like real people even when they aren’t written that way.
It is perhaps for this reason that she prefers watching movies that have emotional depth, even when they belong to genres that tend to avoid such nuance. In a 2025 interview with Radio Times, Moore was asked whether she had a favourite thriller, and she singled out Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film Don’t Look Now, saying, “[It’s] wonderfully human and complicated and maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Interestingly, it’s also about a domestic situation and a tragedy – and it’s also a love story.”
Based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story, Don’t Look Now follows a married couple, Laura and John (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), who travel to Venice following the tragic death of their young daughter so that he can help refurbish a chapel. While there, they meet two elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be in contact with their late daughter. While Laura finds solace in the idea that their dead child might be communicating with them, John becomes increasingly troubled by what he believes to be a hindrance on their journey to acceptance.
Rather than being a fact-paced thriller, Don’t Look Now is a slow-burning mystery wrapped in tragedy and devoid of easy answers or simplistic emotions. Laura and John don’t turn on each other in their grief but find their way back to each other. In one groundbreaking scene, they wordlessly communicate the depth of their intimacy, both physically and emotionally.
One of the reasons it’s so easy to categorise the film as horror is because Christie and Sutherland make the characters so believable. The more you believe them as a couple, the more unfathomable their loss becomes.
The horror in the film is derived as much from the grief as from the mystery. As Moore described, it’s a domestic story that explores the complexity of Laura and John’s relationship. There aren’t many movies that dare to venture into the aftermath of a child’s death, and even fewer that portray the surviving parents as anything other than violently grief-stricken or at odds. Beautifully shot and with a shocking ending, it’s one of the greatest films ever made, in any genre.
