Neil Jordan’s second film, and first delving into horror terrain, was a curious collaboration with writer Angela Carter. Together they set about adapting various stories from the latter’s famous short story collection, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, a series of very adult reworkings of notorious fairy tales. Central to the film adaptation was the story The Company of Wolves which used one particularly famous tale as its foundation.
Two young girls, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) and her older sister Alice (Georgia Slowe), live in a huge mansion in the woods with their parents (David Warner and Tusse Silberg). Returning home from an outing Alice implores her sister, who has recently been obstinately refusing to leave her room, to come out and face her. But in bed Rosaleen is trapped in a hideous dream that conjures up the surreal, expressionistic visions to follow as we, the audience, are subsumed into her dreams. It will be a place of incongruities and illogic, in which sinister sexual and other motifs are refracted from within Carter’s re-imagining of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
Those looking for set-pieces won’t be disappointed after the opening minutes, the first and possibly best is launched as we’re catapulted into the landscape of Rosaleen’s dream world where the rest of the film takes place. Spasmodically twisting in slumber she conceives the death of Alice who is hounded through an ancient, alternate woodland outside their home in which sinister, full-blown versions of their creepy toys come to life. Alice retreats before being cornered by a pack of ravenous golden-eyed wolves.
Later, Rosaleen’s starchy old Granny (Angela Lansbury) has the girl spellbound with the tale of a local woman who foolishly fell for a travelling man (Stephen Rea) who left her on the night of a full moon, only to return years later and rip his skin from his body in rage. Here, special effects creator Christopher Tucker is given his head as the film’s goriest moment, a transformation like that seen to better effect in Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981), is unleashed. It’s wanton, ghoulish fun and holds up well under scrutiny considering the miniscule budget the filmmakers were tethered to.
Jordan’s film is far from a success story but it’s an interesting failure nonetheless. Contributing most to its downfall are the generally ropey performances. Whilst debutant Patterson more than holds her own, the overly mannered Lansbury is more annoying than anything – though on paper she seems a perfect fit for the stern-faced Granny, bleating dire warnings to her granddaughter about staying on the path and never trusting a man whose eyebrows meet.
In a couple of cases, the performances, like that of the hunter (Micha Bergese) who Rosaleen must face in a final confrontation, border on downright awful. Thankfully the look and tone of the film rescue it from the mire and Jordan’s innate sense of squeezing danger from some cleverly conceived scenarios works in its favour.
Composer George Fenton, a regular collaborator of Jordan’s in his early years, provides a wonderful score in which lashings of dark romanticism are undercut by menacing and foreboding electronic embellishments. The cue that accompanies the opening nightmare, in particular, is very effective.
Replete with provocative symbolism, Jordan admits to drawing upon diverse sources of inspiration for his design of The Company of Wolves (1984), including Hammer horror films, the more expressionistic work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Wojceich Has’ s The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) and the work of British artist Samuel Palmer. Though time hasn’t been especially kind to his film, merit lies in both its external appearance and faithful reflection of Carter’s sinister take on the classics. A guilty pleasure perhaps.
I say:
One of Jordan’s lesser films but despite the dodgy acting I still found it strangely watchable.
See it for:
Stephen Rea’s gory transformation scene, the genuinely creepy opening dream sequence and George Fenton’s fantastic score.
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