Red Riding

Again I'm reviewing a TV series and again it's not exactly a TV series as it's three feature length movies with a bigger back story combining them. I haven't read the books so can't compare them and can't comment on wether it was good or not that one of the books (In the Year of Our Lord 1977) was left out from the series. So I'll just focus on these three movies and the story they tell.



Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (2009)

The story starts out with a rookie crime journalist covering a case of a missing young girl. Soon it becomes evident that the girl might have become the next victim of a serial killer hunting for little girls. It seems that the police is quite reluctant to investigate the case thoroughly and seems to be more keen on just beating the confession out of a suiting suspect. Soon the journalist finds out that there's a lot more to the murder mystery than just some psychopath stalking little kids and the bigger story kicks in. Won't go into more details about the story as like always the less you know the better. I'll just say it's quite intriguing and very nicely twisted. The movie itself is a bit of a miss though. It's quite a mess at parts and making it a bit hard to follow with all of it's lingering style. It moves slowly and quite unclearly trying to create an eery atmosphere. At parts it sure does that, but it got a bit too tedious towards the end. Then again there was not as much story to be told in the first part, mainly because they saved the best parts for the later episodes so I guess they tried to fill up the length. Too bad as when the story kicks in again it rushes a bit too much making it an annoying rollercoaster which loses it's sense every once and a while. Also the fetish towards shallow depth of field the cameraman had got a bit annoying at parts when absolutely everything is blurry. The cast is quite great and as the bigger story goes on in the following parts, those smaller characters get more space to develop into the key parts they end up being. Even though the movie was certainly not great, this is definitely worth the watch because it's so much connected to the later parts which surely are worth it.
65%



Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980 (2009)

The second part focuses on a southern cop coming to the north to investigate the Yorkshire ripper case. Someone is murdering prostitutes and the local police seems incapable of catching the killer. Can't really say much more about the story without spoiling the first part, corruption and conspiracy are the main themes. This works a lot better than the first part, the movie holds together nicely and doesn't lose it's grip at any point. At first I actually missed some of the characters from the first part so I was quite lost wether this even had anything to do with the first part, but towards the end I noticed who's who and got back on track. The new characters presented in this part are quite good and the cast is fitting for the roles. All in all a good thriller and surprisingly this would work as a stand alone movie as well, but then you'd miss the big background story connecting the three movies. And that's really not worth missing.
82%



Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1983 (2009)

Very nice ending to the series. Unfortunately on this one I can't really say anything about the story as it ties the first two parts together and would kind of spoil the smaller stories in them. But it's good, trust me. At start I was a bit worried that all of the main characters involved in this part were labeled as "bad guys" on the other two parts, but that actually worked for the good of the movie. Giving it a nice depth and dimension. Some bad people are worse than others, some who you thought were evil persons end up doing the right thing and some you thought were lesser bad end up being the worst kind of evil. Don't worry, there are so many characters that I didn't spoil anything with that. The cast is the similar faces from the previous two parts and again do a solid job. The style of the movie is quite straight forward with only some jumps to the first part, but it doesn't matter as the story is so intriguing that you want it to roll forward like a freight train and that it surely does. Great ending for quite a great series.
80%


As a whole this series is definitely worth watching if you can spare almost five hours for thrilling murder mysteries with some twisted conspiracy behind them.