It's a British film, and it's over five hours long all told, but The Red Riding Trilogy is a masterpiece, and there's nothing new that's better worth your time. In many ways it feels like more than a movie, or three movies, and more like a unified field theory of human darkness and modern social evil, splayed out in grueling, fascinating long form. It spans a full decade of fictional history in the nastiest chunk of "the North Riding" of Yorkshire, with dozens of characters, many of whom seem like neglectable supporting nobodies until they bloom later on as primary figures of malice or guilt or fermented secrets.
Red Riding is also the kind of rule-breaker DVDs were made for -- who's going to the theater and paying three times, or even sitting through it all at that length? At home, you get to come at this baby on your own terms. As you'll have to. It's more than just a massive crime saga, trained on an entire society instead of a single killer or victim -- it's a web of mysteries, many not solvable, with a litany of corpses (sometimes little girls, sometimes teenagers, sometimes cops whacked by other cops) and fewer convenient answers than we're usually comfortable with. Often you wonder why anyone would stay in Yorkshire at all, instead of, say, moving to West Beirut. Each of us will experience the trilogy differently -- connections are not emphasized, and much of the evil machinations happen off-screen.
We're not spared the human damage, though. The three brooding films, directed by Julian Jarrold, Anand Tucker and James Marsh, touch down in the North in 1974, then 1980, then 1983, each chapter ignited by serial killings but fueled beneath the surface by monstrous police corruption. First a hot-blooded young reporter (Andrew "new Spider-Man" Garfield) digs too deeply, then a haunted investigator (Paddy Considine) gets too close to the soft white underbelly, then one of the corrupt cops (David Morrissey), who's been in the background all the while, emerges to find out how exactly his partners' nefarious histories intersect with a new rash of disappearances.
In each case, the hero wades through a sea of crosscurrents, including those caused by an obviously questionable priest (Peter Mullan), a venal developer (Sean Bean), a homeless hustler who knows enough to stay off the grid, scads of victims' mothers (including Rebecca Hall), politicians, police bureaucrats who don't actually ever want anything investigated, and so on. And then there are the detectives themselves, all seething bastards who even nickname each other after forest animals (the Badger, the Owl, the Rat), as if they see themselves in a Grimm fairy tale. Or in Animal Farm, where some animals are more equal than others.
That little is morally clear or easy is the point, of course. The Yorkshire accents leave words unarticulated -- you are free to use the SDHI subtitles, but even natives will lean forward in their seats, wondering what was just unsaid. Made for Brit TV (unsurprisingly) and praised by critic David Thomson as a rival to The Godfather films, Red Riding is a masterpiece, but without an auteur -- credit must be split between the directors, several producers, a single screenwriter and the original novels' author David Peace. It hardly matters. The films pull together into a whole without giving up its disturbing abundance of loose strings, and you'll need to see the trilogy more than once. Few if any films we'll see this year will overshadow it.
The DVD package -- as if you'd need more after you're finished watching the trilogy twice, which you will be compelled to do -- comes with an array of interviews, deleted scenes, and making-of docs.