Thoughts on The Company of Wolves

 

    On Criterion, I watched The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan's 1984 film adapted from Angela Carter's feminist retelling of fairy tales, often twisting the stories to either include more female agency or being about men as predators in the guise of wolves. I really liked it a lot, how slow and dreamlike it felt with the soft-focus and slow-motion, and how the movie would have stories within a dream, occasionally having reality bleeding into the dream, and it being very misty and atmospheric and moody.

    The story initially takes place in the present day, where Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) is a young girl who has a moody relationship with her sister, then she dreams that her family lives in a woodsy village centuries ago, and that her sister is killed by wolves. Rosaleen within the dream is sent to live with her grandmother (Angela Lansbury), who frequently cautions her about "never straying from the path," i.e. being a good girl who never is tempted by desire or doing anything wrong, and never trusting any man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. In this eerie take on Little Red Riding Hood, Rosaleen often disobeys her grandmother by wandering in the woods alone, and is drawn to a strange older man with a unibrow, who may be the wolf her grandmother is warning her about.

    The film interweaves stories of both Rosaleen's dream and stories told to her by her grandmother, often stories about women tempted by wolves and being led astray, or Rosaleen tells stories about others tempted by the Devil or shunned women having their revenge. The stories all mix together, so sometimes it's hard to tell which is in Rosaleen's dream world and which is in the story within a story, but it's all wonderful to watch as Gothic horror.

    I thought this movie was haunting and beautiful, with excellent special effects with the werewolf transformations, where the wolves shed their human skins with puppet wolf head coming out of the mouths of their human heads, it's graphic and glorious to watch. The film is full of obvious metaphors about Rosaleen becoming a woman, like blood dripping onto a white rose and turning it red, or her childhood toys falling to the ground in the finale as a lost of innocence. 

    I had read some of Angela Carter's writings as a teenager, and really liked her a lot, finding her fascinating as a mix of an academic and a fantasy nerd. She sadly died from cancer in 1992 when she was in her fifties, but I'm glad she was around to co-write the adapted screenplay to have her voice in this film, one of Neil Jordan's early directorial efforts. Other notable actors in this film besides Lansbury include David Warner as Rosaleen's father, Stephen Rea as a werewolf, and Terence Stamp in a cameo as the Devil. The film fits in well as a Halloween watch with its autumnal setting, and I highly recommend it.