Red Riding Trilogy is three distinct films, each named for the year in which they are set: 1974, 1980, and 1983 (Peace's series also included one set in 1977, but that wasn't filmed). Though they each could potentially operate as independent creative entities (each has its own director and a distinct style of cinematography), they are really best considered as one solid film in three parts, with characters and plot strands looping through all three like malevolent echoes. The poor viewer who pops into a screening of 1983 as their introduction is going to be even more woefully lost than those who have thrilled to, and been puzzled by, the first two installments.
The heart of the series is fittingly its opening salvo. Directed by Julian Jarrold through a murderously thick fog of decade-specific malaise and cigarette fumes, 1974 features journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, achingly good), back in town from making a hash of his career in London. A trim and rakish cynic apparently able to live on little but alcohol and cigarettes, Dunford has returned just in time for his father's funeral and to start covering a missing-girl story that swiftly oozes darkly in all directions. The case is like an errant thread that, once pulled, starts everything unraveling, and in a few blinks of the eye, gypsy caravans go up in flames, femme fatales plant themselves in Dunford's way, businessmen start playing gangster, and dire rumors fly of police death squads, just back from North Ireland duty and looking to rub out unwanteds.
Tony Grisoni's screenplay has a hard time disguising the sometimes stock post-noir elements of Peace's story, particularly in its evocation of a corrupt police force cozily commingling with business and criminal interests that prey on the innocent and the inconvenient. But just like Peace himself was able to more than compensate for this by the deft muscularity of his writing, Jarrold's densely evocative direction (aided to no end by Garfield's open wound of a performance) gives the story unexpected dimensions. When its pieces start locking together, 1974 achieves a magisterial effect that surpasses nearly any crime film in recent memory.
The reeling impact of 1974 is unfortunately dulled somewhat by its more pedestrian followup, 1980. Although this is the film that most closely mines the historical record, it ironically is the one that feels the least rooted to its time and place. While 1974 fairly reeked of its setting, 1980 feels like more of a standard police procedural, albeit one with more on its mind than a swift and easy conclusion. Following six years of the region being terrorized by the Yorkshire Ripper (the public fury effectively communicated through the interleaving of period news footage through the opening credits), Manchester officer Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is sent to Yorkshire to investigate the Ripper investigation. In the grand tradition of films about internal affairs cops, Hunter and his fellow investigators are marginalized almost from the start, particularly due to the bad memories stemming from his investigation of a bloody and mysterious incident depicted at the end of 1974. While the film deepens the theme of closed-rank police corruption introduced in the first film, James Marsh (a dab hand at documentaries, less successful in narrative filmmaking) directs the film at a cool remove, never quite thrusting it into the grisly heart of the evils left unresolved from the last film.
The trilogy's concluding segment, 1983, is in some ways its most problematic. For one, it spreads its energy between two protagonists -- down-on-his luck lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy) and police superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) -- and leaves both of their characterizations somewhat thin in the process. It also suffers from a certain repetition of effect, what with another disappearance of a girl like back in 1974, and an overabundance of confusingly delineated flashbacks. Director Anand Tucker coaxes more energy out of his performers than Marsh did in 1980, and is mostly able to keep clear the divergent and dangling storylines (as well as multiple minor characters) carrying over from the previous films. But there is no getting around the fact that the film's resolution (a rare hint of grace here amid the series' fetid darkness) will leave more than a few scratching their heads and trying to piece it all together. That many of those will still consider going back and giving the whole series another go is testament to its cumulative power.
Red Riding Trilogy is a bad dream that you don't want to end.
