Red Riding Hood (2011)

Red Riding Hood arrives from 2011 carrying the fingerprints of its director, Catherine Hardwicke, who had recently established the template for brooding adolescent romance set against damp foliage. The source is a folk tale, which spares the production any obligation to accuracy and grants it license to invent a village, a werewolf, and a love triangle in equal proportion. Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a young woman whose parents have arranged a marriage she did not request. She resists it, and by the final act she drives the blade that ends the beast. Those are gestures toward female agency, though the surrounding machinery of longing looks and moonlit pining keeps them at the level of gesture. The film wants a heroine who chooses. It also wants her to wait by a window for a man who becomes a wolf.

Elsewhere the picture is remarkably free of ideological freight. Daggerhorn is white to the last chimney sweep, with one Indigenous performer, Shauna Kain, tucked into a supporting part the camera never lingers on. There is no romantic material of any other kind, no economic grievance, no environmental lament, no argument about how we ought to live. The single figure who invites a modern reading is Roxanne's brother Claude, described as developmentally disabled, whose agitation is mistaken for witchcraft and who is executed by the witch hunter's men shortly after his introduction. He is a device. The film uses him to prove Father Solomon a fanatic, then moves on. That is not advocacy. That is a body count.

What remains is a handsome, silly production that takes itself with great solemnity and asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for fog. Gary Oldman chews the scenery with visible pleasure. Julie Christie appears briefly as a grandmother. The reviews were unkind, the box office was adequate, and the film possesses no evident desire to instruct anyone about anything. We record that as its own modest form of honesty and move to the next item on the docket.