Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
An adaptation of Angela Carter's fairy tales. Young Rosaleen dreams of a village in the dark woods, where Granny tells her cautionary tales in which innocent maidens are tempted by wolves who are hairy on the inside. As Rosaleen grows into womanhood, will the wolves come for her too?
Neil Jordan's adaptation of Angela Carter's revisionist fairy tales is a genuinely singular piece of work — a psychosexual dreamscape that layers folk horror, Freudian symbolism, and feminist subtext into something wholly distinctive. The cinematography and production design are extraordinary, creating a lush, theatrical forest world that feels both handcrafted and deeply unsettling. Novelty is very high: the film's fractured, dream-within-dream structure and its commitment to Carter's literary voice make it unlike almost anything else in horror fantasy. The acting is serviceable — Angela Lansbury is memorably eerie as Granny and Sarah Patterson captures Rosaleen's ambiguous awakening — but it's uneven overall. The plot, being deliberately episodic and parable-like rather than conventionally narrative, works on its own terms but can feel diffuse. The ending, true to the dream logic of the piece, is audacious but divisive — effective as surreal punctuation rather than satisfying resolution.