The Red Riding Trilogy: 1974

Don't let the 1974 fool you, this year merely indicates the time period in which this British crime drama is set. The first film of a trilogy, 1974 sets up the desolate Yorkshire town which has again been struck with the grizzly and brutal murder of a young girl. This makes her merely an entry in string of disappearances over the previous decade. Despite atmosphere thick enough to ski upon, this movie fails to offer much compelling and is a tough slog not only due to its grimy nature but also its convoluted narrative.

What begin with an investigation into a young girls disappearance, gives way to a murder, then to police corruption and bureaucratic cover-ups. Dropped squarely in the center is amateur journalist Eddie Dunford (Andre Garfield) whose combination of determination and coyness take him down a dark road. I will not even delve into the plot more than I have, as not only is it too complex to adequately lay out, but I am still trying to sort it all out myself.

While the performances are uniformly good, the characters are thoroughly unlikeable. Even our protagonist Eddie has a smarmy quality to him that makes it difficult for a real connection to be achieved. This is so with much of Red Riding: 1974, we are kept at arms length; never able to engage with any of the players nor the grief and depression the town is experiencing. Such is amplified further by the engrained ugliness at every corner which inhibits any discernible depth; everyone has demons, everything is wrong and nobody is happy. Thus, the instances of violence are muted by the grimness by which it is surrounded.

If you are really hankering for a dark tragic crime film starring Andrew Garfield, check out Boy-A; a supremely better and more resonant film. The highlight of the film for me was seeing Sean Bean again. His presence in films is an iota of what it should be and he gives one of the films best performances. Not having yet seen the following two instalments of this series I can not say with confidence this film will not be elevated when viewed in context. At this point, what I can say with confidence is Red Riding: 1974 was not an enjoyable experience. Perhaps, then, it was a success in its own right.

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It is 1974. Our protagonist, young and hip, has shaggy hair, sideburns, and a slick leather jacket. Asked about his suit at his father's funeral: "Carnaby's," he admits. "Oh, ay," says one mourner, with a hint of added dismay.

He's been in the South, you see. American viewers with a limited perception of the UK may, at the beginning of Channel Four's remarkable Red Riding trilogy, have little understanding of what difference that makes. They will soon learn. "This is the North," says one of the terrifying policemen who populate this film's haunted Yorkshire. "Where we do what we want."

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 begins under lowering skies. A girl of ten has vanished. A young and callow crime reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) gets clued in by a conspiracy-minded colleague that the vanishing resembles two previous cases within a close range. Eager to make his mark, he senses opportunity, and in excitement at the idea that a serial murderer might be at work he blurts, "Let's keep our fingers crossed."

As the story deepens, however, so does the character. The grief of the victims' families needles him; he begins a relationship with one girl's heartsick mother (Rebecca Hall). Picking apart the story that emerges, he is drawn into the orbit of a wealthy developer (Sean Bean) with an unwholesome degree of influence in Yorkshire and its power structure. The perpetrator of the crimes is unquestionably psychopathic -- he stitches "angels' wings" into his victims' backs. Yet, in the film's most disturbing element, the police department itself functions as a psychopath, achieving its desires through brutalization, torture, and even possibly murder.

Caught in a conscienceless land, Dunford's own conscience, in reaction, grows, and what began as mere ambition transforms into a perhaps doomed lust for the truth. If this sounds like a conventional trope of the genre, it is -- plotwise much of what happens here is conventional. But Red Riding makes the narrative fresh by treating it not just as a story of crime and justice but as one of the soul, and its environs. When Dunford begs the mother to escape with him from the prevailing madness, he tells her, "In the South the sun shines." What he's telling her is that the sickness is inseparable from the place. Yorkshire is filmed (with gorgeous gloom) as a cloud-shrouded ruin, an economic disaster site in which financial power trumps morality. Starting out fresh-faced, vain, and cocky, Dunford will, by the end of his journey, be considerably the worse for wear. Looking at the landscape around him, we think, how could he not be?

Red Riding 1974 is not flawless -- some scenes feel repetitive and the bleakness can be overwhelming. But it compels you forward, it stays with you, and it genuinely rattles the spirit. This is not easy viewing, but in approaching the continuing saga, it promises hard- earned reward.

The Red Riding films have been sitting recorded waiting for me to watch them for quite some time. I set the recorder at the time for them because of the praise they received and the number of well-known names in there, other than this I didn't know too much and didn't know the books they are based off. The plot sees a young journalist returning to northern England and picking up a story about a murdered girl who was found with swan wings sewn onto her back. The police seem to be content with the usual suspects but when he starts digging deeper he finds a world of police corruption and cronyisms, putting him in danger.

When I watched this film I tried to put the hype and critical acclaim out of my mind and just come to it as I found it. As such I was not overly impressed by it but did enjoy it for the grimness that it does well. The film does have an engaging sense of foreboding and toughness that suits the material and it delivers this aspect of it very well in terms of tone, locations, costumes and general feel. However, this is ultimately a story, not just atmosphere, and I was surprised that the film didn't deliver on this particularly well. I've never read the books but I do presume they are longer than this 90 minute film represents and I presume this because it seems like a lot is rammed in here and nothing really has much time to develop or grow before we're onto the next thing. This reduced the impact of the story for me because it did feel like I was being rushed through it rather than being allowed to move around within it. It isn't helped by it more or less going where you think it will go almost by virtue of how quickly it hands you everything, thus focusing on mind on certain characters and scenarios rather than allowing the bigger world to be a thing.

The cast do well even though so many of them seem to have a few minutes each. Garfield is solid in the lead even if he seems to spent a lot of the time just being beaten. Hall works well next to him but outside of these two the cast seem too deep in faces and not deep enough in screen time for them. So people like Marsan, Mercer, Bean, Mullan etc really don't feel like they are well used even if they are good in their moments. Everyone has a good accent but it is worth saying that to those not familiar with it, it may be difficult to always pick up what is being said – this is not just down to the thickness of the accents but the sound engineering here has lots of background noise and, for the sake of atmosphere I guess, seems to have lots of mumbling.

This first film has enough good about it for me to check out the second in the trilogy, but I hope it does better with the actual story telling part. In this case atmosphere and time/place was very well done but the story and characters felt rushed and the impact of the tale was lessened due to this, which is a shame.

A binge watching of RED RIDING TRILOGY, three TV movies adapted from David Peace's RED RIDING QUARTET, where its second chapter 1977 is skipped. Directed by three different directors in three different formats: 1974 by Julian Jarrold in 16mm film, 1980 by James Marsh in 35mm film and 1983 by Anand Tucked with Red One digital camera, the trilogy forebodingly trawls into the organized crimes and police corruption in West Yorkshire through the prisms of three different protagonists while they are wrestling with a series of murder cases, and overall, it inspires to achieve a vérité similitude of the bleak milieu while sometimes being mired with its own navel- gazing, such as narrative banality (1974), over-calculated formality (1980) and poorly indicated flashback sequences (1983).

In 1974, the bright-young-thing Eddie Dunford (Garfield) is an ambitious crime reporter for The Yorkshire Post, who takes it on himself to probe three similar cases of missing or murdered teenage girls, which puts his own life on the line. He hits every nook and cranny of procedural clichés, from losing a dear colleague Barry Gannon (Flanagan). who knows too much of the dirty business (after being inauspiciously warned about his own safety) nevertheless withholds crucial information from Eddie, to the police's porous covering-up of the culprit with a scapegoat Michael Myshkin (Mays), until Eddie meets Paul Garland (Hall), who channels a shopworn ambiguity between a grieved damsel-in-distress and an inscrutable gangster's moll, whom he incurably falls in love with. Finally his path comes across with John Dawson (Bean), a local real estate magnate, and after succumbs to an excruciating reality check signed by both Dawson and police force, Eddie despondently realizes he cannot save nobody, a final vigilante bloodbath is his last gamble to right the wrong in the only option he is left with (again, manipulated). The movie is shot in subdued retro-sheen, Garfield fleshes out Eddie's fix with absorbing commitment, and Hall is magnificent to behold in her blond charisma.

I must have missed something while watching "Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974" because I did not see a spectacular film as some tend to say about it. What I saw was a well made film but nothing so outstanding about a journalist trying to stop a serial killer who murdered little girls back in 1974.

Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) is a persistent yet very naive journalist trying to solve the case behind the disappearance of some girls from the surroundings. The more he goes with the story he'll find more and more trouble, to the point of having a strange tendency of getting punched by corrupt cops who don't want him near of the people who might know what's the truth behind the deaths. Haven't we seen that before?

The film wasn't strong enough to make me feel deeply interested at certain parts (the course of Eddie's investigations are quite boring, so in order to lift things higher the director gives us lots of sex scenes, a little bit pointless but interesting to see, specially because Garfield is in all of that). It's very well made, well acted specially by Garfield and Sean Bean, who plays a powerful businessman. The historical reconstruction, art direction and costumes (the corny pants Andrew wears are priceless) are really good. But I'm a little saturated of plots like that, very surpriseless and very obvious.

So, I made my point of what works in this piece. If you think you should see it go forward. It's up to you. Totally recommendable for fans of Garfield, Bean, Eddie Marsan, Peter Mullan, David Morrissey and others. 6/10