Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1983 (2009)

Just what I expected

Just perfect...

Best movie ever!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

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). Finally in 1983, Detective Inspector Maurice Jobson (Morrissey) , who appears in all three films, holds court in the final one, he is one of the corrupted, but his guilty conscience begins to catch up with him, after a new incident of a missing girl transpires, and he seeks help from a medium Mandy Wymer (Reeves), who evokes his buried memories pertain to his involvement in the investigation in 1974. Simultaneously, a paralleled plot-line introduces a thickset solicitor John Piggott (Addy), the son of a former compromised police officer, visits Michael Myshkin (Mays, a distressingly disturbing scene-stealer, makes great play between prevarication and innocence to the full) in the prison and tries to defend a wronged suspect of the current investigation, Leonard Cole (Kearns), who is Michael's best friend and the son of Reverent Marin Laws (Mullan), but fails due to the atrocious injustice. While, a male prostitute BJ (Sheehan), a pervasive existence in the trilogy, released from the jail and fetches a rifle on his way to vendetta, the three tributaries will converge in the home of Reverent Laws, to bring the seedy crime conspiracy into daylight in the end of the day, yet, the ultimate demise is far from satisfactory, the canker within the institution remains untouched, it is estimable to be so unwavering to expose the ugly truth, but the aftertaste is too disillusioned to purvey a balanced assimilation. Albeit there is no visible sign-posting in its time- frame jumps, which certainly impedes the viewing experience, the third one at least does a fair job to dot the i's and cross the t's. In a nutshell, RED RIDING trilogy is a juggernaut exposé of the society's underside and in retrospect, heralds some more forensic procedural output in UK's televisionary landscape, like THE FALL (2013-to date).

Vicious, disgusting, more than gory, just gross, and yet so true to "life" if this is life. It sure is Yorkshire, accent, desolation and misery (more than plain and simple poverty), cruelty, pollution, greed, vice, perversion, etc. spread all over. All evils in one pouch, one bag in West Yorkshire and the motto that "this is the north, where we do what we want," that's the great beauty of ugliness.It will take you three long episodes to reach the culprit and you won't be surprised at all when you finally come to him. In the meantime the police would have revealed itself the most odious, ferocious and mentally cannibalistic institution you can imagine. Asking a question for them is necessarily hurting, torturing and a few other things of the sort: breaking fingers, crushing burning cigarettes anywhere you can imagine, stripping the suspects naked, and the films do not show them naked (prudes!). There is not one single person in the police force that is able to do anything regular like find a culprit that is really guilty and bring that one to justice. One journalist is driven to craziness and some deadly justice enforcing spree, and yet you will know if he was right in his choice of targets at the end of the third film. Another young man, slightly spaced out will be convinced under duress by everyone, probably only in the police, that he killed the girl. And he will end his life in prison. With little chance to be retried since he signed a confession and pleaded guilty.And quite a few are questioned that way and yet the crimes are going on: kidnapped girls, then raped, and in many ways cut up and carved up and more or less endowed with wings and feathers. And all that in a society that is rotten to the core, that speculates on the death of as many people as possible with pollution and the exploitation of them as long as they live with projects that are as crazy as they are greedy of shopping malls with cinemas and all kinds of entertainments to empty the billfolds of the gullible submissive slaves of the public till they are empty and they can then commit suicide or die young of any kind of hazardous escaping tentative or industrial pollution. And for the girls and women prostitution and promiscuity are the main two udders of everyday suspended death. You can imagine what the other two are.And be sure that all the cadres of the police and the most respected people in this society, lay and clerical, are among the small circle of speculators and their only aim is to make money and thus to keep the surrounding society going because you cannot squeeze money out of marginal miserable derelict and impoverished proletariat. No matter what, they must have just a little bit more than their basic needs to be able to spend that little bit more in the traps of the entertaining plotters.Is it a great trilogy? I do not know but one thing is sure even if at the end the killer is finally put out of the way all the corrupted elite of this part of Yorkshire will not be in any way even questioned, not to speak of prosecuted. After all corruption is the basic human dimension: the survival instinct of the more corrupted declared the fitter, by all means, even selling their parents into slavery and feeding their own children to the industrial sharks of our certainly not post-modern society but definitely pre-modern jungle.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

The seemingly untouchable, corrupt West Yorkshire police, and the true evil mastermind behind the child abductions and murders of the last 14 years, can't resist doing it again. "Red Riding: 1983" sets the story that another young girl has vanished from the same area, nine years earlier. "Red Riding: 1983" cycles back to the terrible events set in motion in "Red Riding: 1974", when a series of young girls went missing and a mentally retarded man, Michael Myshkin (Mays), was wrongfully convicted for the crime. Detective Inspector Maurice Jobson (Morrissey), a regular if mostly background character in the first two films, becomes our first focal point here as a man deeply wrecked by his complicity in the Yorkshire Constabulary's general lawlessness. In 1983, another young girl disappears, and Jobson decides to do some actual police work--and reopening several old cases his colleagues would prefer to keep closed--and sniffing around the likes of series constant Rev. Lawes (Mullan, with the omniscience and eerie stillness of a very dark angel). Simultaneously, in the trilogy's first dual narrative, another lead emerges in the form of John Piggott (Addy), a sad-sack solicitor and Yorkshire native who reluctantly agrees to file an appeal on behalf of Myshkin. Piggott marks the trilogy's most uncomplicated hero.It may come as a surprise that the ending of "Red Riding: 1983" adds a dose of hope to its brackish main course. "Red Riding: 1983" provides a fitting conclusion to a whole that is, in some ways, greater than the sum of its parts." Red Riding" is an effective crime thriller, but it's an even more striking drama about the dark parts of the human soul and man's capacity for inhumanity. The third movie represents the middle ground between the promising-but-uneven" Red Riding: 1974" and its sequel, the shocking and haunting "Red Riding:1980." This time around, there's less in the way of a stand- alone narrative as screenwriter Tony Grisoni, working from the novel by David Peace, stitches closed various plot holes. The finale doesn't answer all of our question, but it provides a sense of closure and clears up a number of nagging questions left over from the previous two segments.What we can take away from all of this is not just an investigation into a series of child murders. This is an in-depth character study of three (or four) main protagonists--as they slowly unfold a ring of corruption surrounding an era of a very specific locale of the UK. As things get "hairy" within each of our main characters' worlds, rather than dig deeper into the case, they instead spend three quarters of the running time of each film digging deeper into their own psych--and begin to like what they see in themselves less and less.

The last part of the "Red Riding"-Trilogy (I'm assuming you have seen the other two at least), this concludes the story. The real main player here, was a side player in the previous ones (though he did have more to "say" than we might have guessed in those movies). The second guy who has a main role, is a solicitor. And while he is reluctant at first, he seems to get his head around to become more involved.But again as with the other characters throughout the series, there are no real likable characters at hand here. Someone called this an adult approach to the thriller genre. You have to figure out, how you feel about that, of course. You might find it dreadful. On the other hand, this is a great thriller. It just needs it's time to unfold. And all the loose points get together at last ... Though some might be disappointed at what we get served ... I personally still feel, that the first movie was the strongest.