"THE RED RYDING TRILOGY"

 

In the February 15 issue of The New Yorker", which I'm just now getting around to reading, is a review of a movie called "The Red Ryding Trilogy". Generally, I like the way the Brits do mysteries, but the "sensationally violent" puts me off. I avoid violent movies because I spend much of the time looking down and shielding my eyes not quite fast enough to avoid the bloody scenes.

“This is the North—we do what we want.” These defiantly jocular words are spoken by a policeman as he throws a young reporter out the back of a van. The scene takes place in “Red Riding: 1974,” the first in a series of films, “The Red Riding Trilogy,” made last year for British television’s Channel 4, and now released in theatres as a mammoth, sensationally violent and beautiful five-hour movie. (The trilogy is also available on cable, as a video on demand under the rubric “IFC in Theaters.”) The North in the policeman’s boast is West Yorkshire—the city of Leeds, mostly, but also featureless pale-green moors and, among them, small, rubbly towns with dead-looking brown houses.

Hey! I've been to the scary places, Leeds, and the pale-green moors, although I didn't see a lot of green, pale or not, when I was in the Yorkshire Moors in March.

The books on which the movies are based are fictionalized accounts of the North of England's most recent and horrific serial crimes, such as the "'Moors murders,' of five children, between July, 1963, and October, 1965; the murder of thirteen women by Peter William Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, between 1975 and 1980; 80; and a miscarriage of justice that saw Stefan Kiszko, a twenty-six-year-old tax clerk from Rochdale, serve sixteen years for a 1975 murder that he did not commit."

Forgoing digital effects, or any presence of the supernatural, “The Red Riding Trilogy” nevertheless achieves a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children’s story. Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil.

Who knew? The only place in Yorkshire in which I experienced the uncanny was in my visit to Rievaulx Abbey, which was, for me, one of the thin places, where I felt the presence of the holy, a place where the prayers of many seemed to linger in the the Abbey.

But wait! The Los Angeles Times says:

The powerfully disturbing "Red Riding" trilogy will haunt you waking and sleeping, night and day. If you survive the watching of it, that is, which is no easy thing.
....

Rather, the hard paradox of this project is that what makes these merciless films at times almost unbearable to watch also makes them frankly impossible to get out of your mind. Not only do they create a gritty, compelling world thick with the fetid air of venality, corruption and desperation, but they also periodically traffic in ghastly and horrific torture, sometimes shown, sometimes merely described, but always circling back to a series of sadistic, soul-destroying murders of women and little girls.

Although I'm intrigued by the reviews of the film, scenes of torture, or even descriptions of torture, would probably be a deal-breaker for me.

Have any of you from across the pond seen the series? Or anyone from the US, since the film is showing now at theaters?