Red Riding Hood opens on a scene that’s a bit rougher than you might imagine. When you picture the lead character of this film, Valerie, you imagine that she will be the portrait of virginal, moral purity. When the film opens we see her as a little girl. She looks sweet enough; she skips along to fetch some water, sunlight glows in her blond locks. But suddenly, when she arrives at the stream, she is confronted by a wild boy. He rough houses with her, he carries a knife. He seems like trouble. But Valerie seems to know him, and more, she seems quite fond of him. The two go off together to catch a rabbit with the intentions of killing and skinning it. After they have the thing trapped we get a twist. The wild boy backs out of slitting its throat and it’s Valerie who insists on going through with the killing. It seems that she has a little bit of a blood lust in her. But just as you think she’s about to slit the bunny’s throat, the camera shies away. It’s kind of a metaphor for the rest of the movie. Just as you think it might go somewhere interesting, instead it shies away.
The first thing that stands out during the Red Riding Hood viewing experience is the visuals. In the first few scenes everything is bathed in a soft glow. We are deep in a heavy forest, but an impossible amount of natural light pours through every crack and crevice in the canopy. The whole world has a soft, otherworldly feel and a fairy tale aesthetic… and then the wolf takes a victim. When her body is discovered, the first snowflake falls, and then we are entombed in cold, dead darkness for the rest of the film. Winter is here, and with it comes danger and dread. As we get further into the village and the forest we start to notice the design flourishes more and more. Everything is covered with spikes in this movie. The buildings, the trees, everything is presented as a potential danger. Really, the set design is all very thoughtful and well done. The village we’re in isn’t something impossible, but it’s all just a bit too ornate to really exist anywhere. I imagine a tweenage girl could watch this film and really fall in love with the idea of moving here. Where the film’s setting fails is not in its design, but in its execution. The sets themselves are too small. They seem hollow and fake. They look too new. There’s nothing lived in about them. While you watch the film it feels more like you’re going through a fairy tale village play land in one of the movie studio theme parks than it feels like you’re watching real people living real lives. And the costuming doesn’t help at all. All of the clothes are brightly colored, clean, and new. There is no trace of the tattered, faded rags that people living in a remote village would really wear. It gives the whole presentation the feeling of being a stage play rather than a movie. A little grime would have gone a long way to making this thing more engrossing.
Okay, so when you aim something toward teenagers the first thing you’re obviously going to pay attention to is how it looks. Now that the looks are out of the way, the second thing we need to look at is story: or more specifically, the love triangle. The one we get here is between the grown up Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), the grown up ruffian Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), and the more well to do guy that Valerie has had a marriage arranged with Henry (Max Irons). The way the conflict gets set up is absolutely embarrassing in its pointedness. Every interaction any of the three characters has happens within earshot of the third. They seem to be completely incapable of inhabiting any space more than a few feet apart from one another. You begin to wonder if they watch each other as they go to the bathroom. In addition to this, the way the triangle is constructed is so well worn that it feels like this must be a remake of some sorts. Or maybe just a rerun of something you watched on cable one night. One of the boys is stable and good, the other dangerous and sexy. The girl must choose between what may be best for her and what she most desires. You see where all of this is going. If nothing else, Red Riding Hood knows its audience, it gives them exactly what they’re expecting, and at no point does it even play at subtlety. If you’re a 13 year-old girl that might be good news, but for everyone else, watching this romance play out is going to be something of a chore.
What works out much better, comparatively, is the story of the werewolf and the killings that plague the village. Whenever the wolf is on the prowl the camera switches to a kinetic, first person shot. The result is very Evil Dead, so much so that I would be surprised if Raimi’s horror films weren’t a direct inspiration for a lot of the camera work. When the sun goes down we get montage images of people running inside and locking their doors. This presentation lends a lot of gravity to the danger of the wolf, and subsequently engages you in where it’s murder spree is going. Much of the movie is taken up by the mystery of who the wolf is. At the beginning of the film there is a pact. As long as everyone in the village stays indoors during a full moon, and they leave a pig chained up for the wolf to eat, it won’t kill any people. Once that pact is broken everything is thrown into upheaval. Everyone is a suspect and no one can be trusted. The movie does a good job of teasing every character you’re introduced to as a possible suspect for wolfdom. Usually in movies like this there is one suspect they’re obviously trying to get you to think is the culprit, but who obviously isn’t, and one character who is clearly the culprit because their reveal would be the most “cerebral” twist. Red Riding Hood doesn’t fall into this trap and is subsequently a competent mystery, if nothing else. But I should mention that it does miss the boat when it comes to being truly satisfying. For a minute it looked like the reveal was going in an interesting new direction, one that would blow up the tropes of the teen romance story and do something new, but then it copped out. It didn’t go as far as to choose the least interesting possible person to be the wolf, but it did resolve itself in a way that completely lacked teeth.
Where the plot really falters is in the third act. The story as it’s being told suddenly veers off in a strange direction so that the movie can adhere to the basic plot of the original “Red Riding Hood” fairy tale. So, seemingly out of nowhere, we go from a pretty standard love triangle story with a werewolf movie backdrop to skipping off to grandmother’s house with a basket in hand. It was enough for me to use the red hood as an image that brought up memories of childhood stories. I didn’t need so concrete a connection to the original tale, and the film’s attempt to shoehorn one in felt to me like a last minute rewrite. There were points where I was watching this movie that I could practically smell the studio notes.
Even though these sorts of teen movies never really pay much attention to the quality of the acting, something should be said about it anyways. Let’s start out with the obvious. What is Gary Oldman doing in this movie? I mean other than classing it up beyond what it deserves. He plays a shrewd, werewolf hunting religious man that the village calls in during a moment of desperation, and he’s actually pretty good. He goes from a wise, sympathetic figure, to a little bit of a sycophant, to landing pretty squarely into the villain category. The transition is smooth and well acted. He doesn’t even venture into ridiculous, overacting Gary Oldman mode. And then there’s Amanda Seyfried. At this point she’s pretty much made her career about classing up utter dreck with her presence. She is so magnetic and so able to present cheesy material with a grounding sincerity that makers of B-level schlock should name her a national treasure. And this is all well and good, I commend her, but when is she going to get some good scripts and some good filmmakers to work with? Give her the same projects that a Mia Wasikowska or a Carey Mulligan have been choosing and I feel that she could be just as widely revered as those actresses for her skill. I like her and all, but I’m starting to get sick of the way she draws me to these poison pictures like a bug to a bug zapper. I want more from you Amanda, get a new agent or something. Other than those two, nobody is really worth mentioning. Especially the two male romantic leads who are so wooden and generic that I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart if one wasn’t fair-haired and the other dark. Talk about a couple of stiffs.
As Herculean as the efforts of Seyfried and Oldman to class up the movie are, they aren’t quite able to get this one up to passable. While some of the aspects of this production are surprising, and even borderline good, there are other elements that are just too flat out embarrassing to come back from. There is a mentally handicapped character whose inclusion and portrayal is embarrassing and unnecessary. There’s a scene where Valeria and Peter sexy dance with other people in order to make each other jealous that feels completely out of place with the rest of the film and looks like something out of a WB drama. After everything they do to properly convey the danger of the werewolf, we get a scene where he telepathically talks to Valerie that is so painfully poorly conceived that I legitimately shook my head. The fact that they have a giant wolf talking like a person is bad enough, but when it reveals that it has the hots for Valerie’s character, things just get downright asinine. It turns out this one girl is absolutely the center of everybody’s universe. A term has been coined for when a character is overly idealized. When they seem to be the writer’s perfect version of themselves written into the script and living out all of their fantasies. That’s when you call a character a Mary Sue. Valerie is one of the most blatant Mary Sues this side of fan fiction. It’s bad enough when movies about guys can only write their female characters as idealized yet shallow objects to be obtained. When a movie with a girl as the main character does it the result is absolutely insufferable. Liking too slightly different studs isn’t complexity of character; Valerie is a blank page. When your protagonist isn’t even interesting, good luck getting anybody engaged in the rest of your film.
And what’s the deal with every story aimed towards teenage girls telling them that the only choice in romance they have is the dark, bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks? By the end of this film it seemed like Red Riding Hood might buck the trend by making the nice guy just as desirable as the bad boy, but before that can happen he is suddenly jettisoned out of the story so that the girl can be with her dangerous, not really boyfriend material in the real world, “soul mate”. And without getting into details, the character of Peter is such damaged goods and so undateable by the end of the film that he shouldn’t have been an option at all. But the movie just ignores everything that happens to his character so that the 13 year olds can gush over their girl-gets-the-bad-boy ending that they’ve been trained to want. With stories about men it is the complete opposite. All the way back to the classic film noirs there has been the trope of the femme fatale. When a male character gets involved with a dangerous woman he ends up having his entire life compromised and destroyed. The message is always clear: stick with the girl next store, she might not be as mysterious and intriguing as that crazy girl you meet in the alley, but she at least won’t wreck your life. It’s a good message. Yet we tell our young females that the only life worth living is one where you are surrounded by shady characters. I don’t know exactly what this says about our society or our socio-psychological makeup, but I imagine it has to say something. Unfortunately, Red Riding Hood doesn’t.
