Cult Cinema: The Company of Wolves (1984) - Reviewed

Courtesy of ITC Entertainment Limited

Four years before Bernard Rose’s big screen debut film Paperhouse let loose a kind of Freudian horror spin on Alice in Wonderland, Britain saw another filmmaker make a deep dive into feminine dreamland while reworking a classical text with modern allegorical eyes.  That came in the form of Neil Jordan’s second feature film in 1984 with The Company of Wolves, a kind of waking-nightmarish labyrinthine coming-of-age reworking of Little Red Riding Hood loosely adapted from Angela Carter’s short story of the same name contained in the text The Bloody Chamber. 
 
Co-adapted by Carter herself and Neil Jordan, the film does for the classic tale of the Big Bad Wolf what John Boorman’s Excalibur did for the legend of King Arthur in that it took ostensibly a fairy tale and transformed it into an adult oriented meditation on budding sexuality.  If you’ve seen the DyE “Fantasy” video, you’ve a rough idea of what’s ahead in terms of depicting prepubescent fears through visceral bodily horror.  Like Paperhouse or even a touch of The Princess Bride, the film opens in the present day before making a fantastical leap into fantasy with the lines between the real and imaginary growing increasingly blurred.
 
In modern England within a country house sleeps young girl Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), dreaming she, her sister Alice (Georgia Slowe) and parents (Tusse Silberg and David Warner) live in some kind of 18^th century English forest.  This tranquil fluffy dreamscape quickly turns nightmarish when Alice is killed by wolves and Rosaleen seeks solace under the vigil of her grandmother (Angela Lansbury) while her parents grieve.  Early on, her grandmother issues a word of warning, “Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet”.

 
From here, the film becomes at once a technically proficient exercise in fantasy horror as we witness man-to-werewolf transformations which would rival that of An American Werewolf in London, stunning production design from Full Metal Jacket and Batman designer Anton Furst, lush cinematography by Bryan Loftus and an evocative, often terrifying score by George Fenton.  At first it seems easy, but as Rosaleen’s grandmother imparts more tales the film takes on a Chinese Box structure where a door opens and we don’t know what came before or would follow after.  In other words, the roadmap to this metatextual rethinking of the deeper meanings behind Little Red Riding Hood slowly disintegrates until we’re as lost as the film’s dreaming heroine.
 
In only his second feature, Neil Jordan not only establishes a command over the visual medium with extraordinary set pieces that would make Ridley Scott blush (Stanley Kubrick famously hired Furst after seeing this movie), but it also forms a rapport with his ensemble cast with actors who would return to work with the director again over the years.  Sarah Patterson as Rosaleen makes her variation on the Red Riding Hood mythos one that can be read as a cipher for teen adolescence and the uneasy transitional period between youth and adulthood.  Fans of British cinema will delight in the ensemble cast including but not limited to David Warner, Angela Lansbury, fellow Werewolf in London veteran Brian Glover, Stephen Rea, Jim Carter and even an unexpected turn from Terence Stamp as diablo himself no less.

 
While on the surface an adaptation of sorts of the old English fairytale which has been (and continues to be) adapted to film over time, this is distinctly a Neil Jordan film that is more about the coexistence between dreamland and the waking state in the fragile mind of a teenager coming to terms with her fears about men and in particular masculine sexuality.  The wolf himself becomes a metaphor for the animalistic menace of male lust including a memorable encounter with a handsome womanizer who appears charming but exudes a danger that he could turn into white fang at any second.
 
Like the dreamer herself, The Company of Wolves starts out in the present day as an overt treatment of Little Red Riding Hood before gradually transmogrifying into a nebulous, often frightening and bloody gory rumination on what it means to be literally and figuratively a sheep in a wolf’s den.  While not precisely horror, the film manages to be deeply disturbing on an existential level that is as much about the dangers of male sexuality as it is about a young girl deep in nightmare about her own fears of maturing into womanhood. 

 
Curiously (and perhaps unfortunately), the United Kingdom property was picked up in the US by Cannon Films who marketed the film as a straight horror venture, which it is and isn’t.  For a second feature film by a then-young director, it represents an astonishing and confident venture into mainstream filmmaking.  An overwhelmingly audiovisual experience that is often scary when it isn’t kind of magical, The Company of Wolves as allegorical fantasy might be one of the best British films ever made about distinctly female adolescence and how much the dream world is designed to deal with and process what we know about the real world. 

--Andrew Kotwicki