Red Riding trilogy

Marathon of modern noir: Grisly British crime trilogy is riveting

February 19, 2010|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Some crimes seem too enormous for one tale to tell - they demand the slow, horrible disclosure of weekly tabloid installments or a television miniseries. Or a single extended endurance test. The three “Red Riding’’ films, themselves winnowed down for British TV down from four interrelated crime novels by David Peace, unspool one after the other at the Kendall starting this week.

That’s 300 minutes of tawdry secrets vomited into the cold Yorkshire air, covering a decade of fictional mayhem, murder, and almost Shakespearean corruption. You can see the films separately but you might as well see them one after the other; while the quality of the filmmaking varies, the sense of a vast provincial spider web of evil extending off the screen keeps you rapt in your seat. When it clicks, the “Red Riding’’ trilogy is the movie equivalent of a malevolent paperback read you can’t bring yourself to put down.

Each of the films has a different hero, if that’s the right word - no one here is innocent. The first, “Red Riding: 1974,’’ at least gives us a foul-mouthed naïf in Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a young crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post who has recently returned from not making it big in London. He’s an ambitious baby shark, so when he hears that the disappearance of a local schoolgirl bears similarities to two previous vanishings, he’s off poking his nose where it shouldn’t go.

Standard stuff so far, even if director Julian Jarrold apes the skittery, paranoid prose of Peace’s novel with a variety of cinematic tricks: grainy 16mm stock, jumpy editing, a general visual sense of being unmoored on the moors. The details, when they’re glimpsed, are off-the-charts grisly, and the people Eddie encounters, whether victims or victimizers, are deeply damaged.

“1974’’ sends narrative feelers in many directions: into the upper echelons of a local developer (Sean Bean) and the police force he controls, down into the murk of a teenage hustler (Robert Sheehan) who knows much too much. Eddie gets involved with the mother of one of the missing girls and Rebecca Hall gives the role a welling sadness the movie needs as an emotional anchor. As a stand-alone experience, “1974’’ is frustrating because it’s the opposite of closure - all the pieces of the puzzle are floating on the surface without connection, and we only briefly glimpse the pit beneath.