The Company of Wolves

1/12/2023

This film is pretentious. Wizard of Oz meets a horror movie to discuss the s(REDACTED)xuality of a (REDACTED FOR ARBITRARY REASONS!!!!)aged girl. This is a pretentious art house movie and one that thinks that it is vastly more intelligent than it really is. It wants to retell the Little Red Riding hood story in a semi-erotic way, but never actually achieves it. But, at least it's pretty.

7/24/2023

There's a lot of "Little Red Riding Hood" to this Neil Jordan fantasy about the young "Rosaleen" (Sarah Patterson). This woman is prone to vivid dreams set many centuries earlier, where she lives happily with her parents (and without her dull as ditchwater sister) and where she is regular regaled with portentous stories by her grandmother (Angela Lansbury). It's in one such dream, and whilst walking through the woods to visit her elderly relative that she encounters a handsome and enigmatic young man who wants to bet who will reach the old woman's house first! She is intrigued, but is she prepared for the true identity of her admirer? Though the story is a bit staccato at times, but this is still a rich and vividly constructed adaptation of a story that mixes romance, fable and a soupçon o

8/23/2026

*The Company of Wolves* initially looks as though it has been trapped indoors. Its forests are obviously constructed, its village feels theatrical, and even the electronic score occasionally threatens to wander in from an early-1980s *Doctor Who*. Then the film quietly makes the case that this artificiality is not something to forgive. It is the point. Rosaleen is dreaming, and Neil Jordan’s film allows the dream to build its own geography. Objects from her waking world turn up among the trees, including toys from the bedroom where she sleeps. By the end, the movement has reversed and the forest is pushing its way into the house. Reality has not simply been escaped. It has been taken apart and rebuilt into something capable of expressing fears and desires that Rosaleen does not yet have