In Theaters: Red Riding Trilogy

Built from the brittle bones of British novelist David Peace's quartet of novels, the Red Riding Trilogy reimagines a bleak and bloody period in Northern England's history in a broad-shouldered, brutal noir mold. Three directors have accepted the challenge to prove that -- despite the plot's reliance on crime thriller catnip like child murders and police corruption -- every failed society fails in its own, godforesaken way. It's heavy trucking on paper -- Peace's grim take on a decade of moral and systemic decay in Northern England divided critics with its esoteric, often impenetrable poetic style. But on film, his vision of a country rotted almost to its core substitutes mood and atmosphere for the intricate narrative that was lost in translation. I'm unconvinced that these neo-noir downers had anything specific to say about life in England in the 1970's and '80s, although their aesthetic case for the country's free-ranging miserabilism is airtight.

The first film in the trilogy is Julian Jarrold's 1974, and the director of Brideshead Revisited and Becoming Jane asserts his period bona fides by shooting in grotty 16 mm. It's an effective choice for a paranoid conspiracy thriller: the smeared celluloid itself seems to have fallen into the wrong hands. We follow Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a cub reporter annexed to Yorkshire after a failed stint in the Fleet Street press corps. When Eddie suspects that a recent murder of a little girl might be connected to several similar killings, all of Yorkshire seems to rally to block his path. Most effective in their discouragement are the vicious Bobbies who crop up every time he gets too close to making a breakthrough to dispatch a brutal beat-down. "This is the North," one snarls, before shoving Eddie out of a moving van, "We do what we want."

Characters at both Eddie's paper and within the stonewalling police force pile up quickly, several making appearances that won't be fully explained until the third installment. Paranoia reigns and with good reason, it turns out: the bodies of the nosy and the easily scapegoated begin to drop with what will become a numbing frequency. All of Eddie's alliances -- from his coworkers to the "clean" cops to the mother of another murdered girl named Paula (played with defiant self-preservation by Rebecca Hall) -- prove fleeting. Only Jarrold's camera, which haunts Eddie from various darkened corners when it does not appear to be perched right on his shoulder, proves a constant ally. At times the camera seems a direct extension of Eddie's consciousness: in his tense and then sensual scenes with Paula the screen flushes a sympathetic pink. Whether it is a signal of tenderness or warning or both we will soon see.

The audience also learns, despite the connection Jarrold's intimate and impressionistic camera work encourages, not to form any allegiances of their own: in Yorkshire the good guys are finished off last. The second installment, 1980, offers another such fellow, this time a police constable named Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine). Brought in to examine the Yorkshire Police investigation into the "Yorkshire Ripper" murders (a real-life case that terrorizing Northern England during the period), Hunter is confronted with another raft of butchered women and the same suspicious crew of policemen. When Hunter and his colleague (Maxine Peake, only the second woman with a substantive role in this strictly macho affair) determine that one of the murders has been wrongly slipped onto the Ripper's docket, again all hell breaks loose to keep the lid on Yorkshire's fetid cauldron of police misconduct. The most self-contained and cinematic of the trio (director James Marsh happily blew most of his budget on 35 mm film), 1980 is grounded by a strong central performance and a classical internal affairs structure.

Given the thankless task of narrative clean-up, director Anand Tucker must dedicate much of 1983 to revelatory flashbacks. Lacking the polish of the second film and the aggressive style of the first, what's left is Tucker's workmanlike approach to tidying up a story that has sprawled beyond the trilogy's means. Another young girl is dead, and this time a solicitor named Piggott (Mark Addy) is pulled into the case after a neighbor asks for his help in clearing her son, who was wrongly convicted in the killing 1974 centers on. Responsible for the cover-up in that case is a detective named Jobson (David Morrissey) whose conscience is finally getting the best of him; the two men work independently toward a confused but ostensibly optimistic conclusion.

It's a departure from Peace's unrelentingly nihilistic sign off, and yet by the end of more than four hours of lovingly stylized viciousness -- an approach that proves less effective than the filmmakers seem to suppose -- the sliver of light barely registers.