Red Riding Hood (2011)

Red Riding Hood, the latest big-screen adaptation of the gruesome folktale, takes the shape of a chaste romantic triangle between a headstrong girl and two cute boys, one of whom might be a werewolf. Sound familiar?

If images of Stephenie Meyer’s world of moody teenage girls, sparkly vampires and docile werewolves just popped into your head, you get the gold star. If, on the other hand, you’re inclined to believe that any film directed by Catherine Hardwicke and including Billy Burke in the cast will be devoid of shades of Twilight, then you ought to take off now. But before you go, can I interest you in a bridge? Only slightly used.

This time around, the girl is Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), a pretty young thing who lives in a medieval village that has been terrorized for decades by a wolf. Even so, Valerie is fearless and often ventures into the woods alone. In order to appease the wolf, the rest of the fearful villagers must make a sacrifice of their very best livestock each full moon. But the uneasy truce is violated when the wolf kills Valerie’s sister early in the film.

Valerie is comforted by two eager gentlemen callers: a blandly good-looking young woodcutter named Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and a blandly good-looking young blacksmith named Henry (Max Irons, son of Jeremy). Choices, choices. She’s been promised in marriage by her parents (Virginia Madsen and Billy Burke) to the latter, who represents a better financial opportunity, but she’s been in love with the former since the two were children. As children, Valerie showed Peter she wasn’t like the other girls when she slit the the throat of rabbit that they had hunted together.

To fight the beast, the town has summoned Father Solomon (Gary Oldman), a deranged–but when isn’t Oldman deranged these days–priest who brings his own brand of terror to the town by revealing that they are not hunting an ordinary wolf, but the shapeshifting, silver-shy, computer-generated variety. The werewolf, he warns, is most likely hiding in plain sight among the villagers. And it has a connection to Valerie, of whom it is so enamored that it will not leave the village alive without her. Is the werewolf hair-gel-laden suitor number one, or hair-gel-laden suitor number two? Or, is it someone even closer to Valerie?

I won’t say. I’ll leave director Catherine Hardwicke’s familiar (if you’ve seen the original Twilight film) bag of tricks to tell the tale. Having started her career as a production designer, Hardwicke’s scene-setting skills are considerable. While the straw-thatched roofs and medieval torture devices (including a fascinating, underutilized elephant-shaped human pressure cooker) are hardly realistic, they do create a very particular gothic air. They’re the beautiful and eery sort of thing you might have expected to see in an Evanescence music video circa 2004.

In fact, Red Riding Hood often plays like a very good music video. Hardwicke exercises her penchant for long, aerial shots across white-washed, snowy landscapes, punctuates them with bright red accents, and underscores them with electronic goth music. I don’t think any of the songs are by Paramore this time around, but Fever Ray’s “The Wolf” is a close facsimile.

Still, a music video is not a motion picture. For all its atmospheric visual charm, this emo Red Riding Hood isn’t really interesting enough to sustain its 100-minute runtime. The story, as penned by David Johnson, does little to refresh the familiar fairytale. I appreciate that he imbued the script with flashes of zenophobic paranoia and insular jealousies that are reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible when they work. Unfortunately, they’re also reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village when they don’t. Either way, there just aren’t enough of those elements to give the story its moral.

Instead, Red Riding Hood focuses on the not sexy enough love triangle. I hoped that with the “little” dropped from the title (Valerie is at least 17) and the inclusion of Hardwicke’s sumptuous visual style and Seyfried’s unique brand of sex appeal, this retelling would have been…hotter. If Seyfried’s creamy decolletage, enormous gimlet eyes, and red pouty mouth don’t scream sex, you must be as hard of hearing as the makers of this film.

Seyfried does manage to let glimmers of her bold sexuality shine through in two scenes. Early on, Peter tells Valerie that he could “just eat her up,” but when she longingly asks him if he wants her, it’s clear that she’s the one with the voracious appetite. That girl, as played by Seyfried, could eat him for lunch. The second scene is a small near-mouth kiss she gives Henry before he goes off to hunt the wolf. It’s treated as a throwaway moment but, in reality, is hot enough to melt celluloid.

Red Riding Hood would have done well to acknowledge and incorporate more of those moments. After all, fearless Valerie is no clumsy, timid Bella Swan. It might have offended some parents of the teen girl audience, but it would also would have said something very important. Some girls just aren’t scared of the Big Bad Wolf.