~ by Rebecca Fisher

If you were ever to try retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood whilst high on an acid trip, you might well end up with this film. With layered framing devices, nested stories-within-stories, and plenty of dream sequences, I guarantee that The Company of Wolves is one of the strangest movies you’ll ever see.

Directed by Neil Jordan, who specializes in dark-and-bloody films, and adapted from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a short-story collection that explores the dark side of fairy tales, the story is mostly set in an 18^th century village on the edge of a forest. Rosaleen is a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, her family still grieving for the recent death of her older sister. She’s a frequent visitor to her Grandmother’s house, who dispenses sage advice (“never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle”) and tells her strange and eerie stories about the wolves that live in the forest.

There is no clear story here, but rather an exploration of fairy tales and how they’re thematically linked to the transition from childhood to adulthood. Every shot is soaked with symbolism and strangeness, and though the final act does start to closely resemble the story of Little Red Riding Hood, there’s no linear narrative throughout the film’s running time. It’s hard to know what to make of it all.

Rosaleen meets the proverbial stranger in the woods

But The Company of Wolves is worth watching precisely because of its strangeness, and even though you’ll spend most of it thinking “what the heck is going on?”, there is a hypnotic quality to this mode of storytelling that sure beats the predictable nature of most movies.

You could spend hours trying to untangle the meaning of what appears on the screen. Do the wolves represent burgeoning sexuality? What was the significance of the frogs? Who was the girl in the well? Why did Rosaleen find those strange eggs in the treetop? What was the deal with the man in the back of the white car in the middle of the forest? It’s all immensely complicated and challenging and confusing, and therein lies the appeal – though naturally a film as odd as this isn’t for everyone.

So this happens… just don’t ask me how or why

Because it was made in 1984, rubber prosthetics, elaborate puppetry and even robotics are utilized to capture the transformation of human beings into wolves, and it’s a rather nostalgic experience to see such things done “old school” without the help of CGI.

The Company of Wolves has become something of a cult classic in recent years, and there are plenty of essays out there that attempt to make sense of its content, but there’s also something to be said for leaving much of what happens here in the realm of the unknowable. To quote a main character: “that’s all I’ll tell you because that’s all I know.”
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Next Time: Another Earth

What would happen if one day another Earth appeared in the sky? And what if this premise was married to something as mundane and yet life-changing as a car accident? That’s the basis of Another Earth, a sci-fi film that really uses the freedom of the genre to ask the age-old question: “What if?”
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About The Reviewer:

Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com and her They’re All Fictional blog.

To read Rebecca’s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, as well as preceding reviews, click on:

Big Worlds On Small Screens

Rebecca is also currently a finalist for the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2015 for “Best Fan Writing”.