Red Road: DVD Review
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Peter Gutiérrez
Over the past fifteen years, Peter's work in horror and other genres, in the form of short fiction, poetry, criticism, and comics, has appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals. Current publications:Dark Territories Read by Dawn Volume 3 Diamond BookShelf Shroud Withersin UnderGround Online (UGO)
By Peter Gutiérrez
Published on 09/11/2007
The Cannes-honored thriller is dark, masterful, and fearless for most of its running time; then it turns into something that’s… well, not a thriller.
Red Road: DVD Review
For fans of shadow cinema, Red Road (2006) is certainly worth a rental. However, I won’t blame you if you want to stop watching about ten minutes before the end. Of course that’s the time when, in an effective thriller, you’d least want to throw in the towel. And the funny thing is, Red Road is effective—until it decides to shift gears and become a message drama. I might not have minded this transition in principle if, to use an overworked phrase, it had been done organically. However, in practice there’s a jolting bifurcation at work here: we’re given a relentless, haunted protagonist and an ever-increasing atmosphere of dread but there’s no cathartic payoff for either of these elements. I didn’t dislike the epiphanic ending per se, it just seemed to be part of some other movie that, sure, I might want to see eventually but not tacked on to the end of this one; that is, to a bleakly compelling work that had been steadily tightening its grip around my throat.
Red Road ’s title refers to a housing project in Glasgow, but it’s also a wonderful metaphor for revenge. In fact, it’s a tribute to the movie’s narrative dexterity that we’re fully hooked into the vengeance-driven plot long before we ever learn about the original crime that’s being avenged. To be sure, there’s certainly enough to keep our eyes bulging and our hearts pounding in the meantime. The main character, Jackie, watches her sickly-looking city on a wall of surveillance screens, each one showing a miniaturized, cut-gem drama much as was done in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). But just when I’m afraid Red Road will become mired in pretentious, self-reflexive commentaries on voyeurism and privacy, it morphs into an extremely grim cat-and-mouse exercise (the more so because the mouse is unaware it’s a mouse). Still later, a graphic sex scene audaciously ratchets up the dramatic and psychological tension even more. Viewed in this light, as a story that consistently keeps two or three steps ahead of audience expectations, I suppose the ending that I found so baffling can be seen as yet one last manifestation of the movie’s unpredictable spirit.
Red Road ’s title refers to a housing project in Glasgow, but it’s also a wonderful metaphor for revenge. In fact, it’s a tribute to the movie’s narrative dexterity that we’re fully hooked into the vengeance-driven plot long before we ever learn about the original crime that’s being avenged. To be sure, there’s certainly enough to keep our eyes bulging and our hearts pounding in the meantime. The main character, Jackie, watches her sickly-looking city on a wall of surveillance screens, each one showing a miniaturized, cut-gem drama much as was done in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). But just when I’m afraid Red Road will become mired in pretentious, self-reflexive commentaries on voyeurism and privacy, it morphs into an extremely grim cat-and-mouse exercise (the more so because the mouse is unaware it’s a mouse). Still later, a graphic sex scene audaciously ratchets up the dramatic and psychological tension even more. Viewed in this light, as a story that consistently keeps two or three steps ahead of audience expectations, I suppose the ending that I found so baffling can be seen as yet one last manifestation of the movie’s unpredictable spirit.
In any case, the filmmakers, led by the extremely talented Andrea Arnold, do so many things well—from sound design to cinematography to developing hard-boiled yet three-dimensional characters—that I still feel confident in recommending this film.
By the way, also included on the disc is Arnold’s Academy-Award-winning short, The Wasp. While not a horror film (although certainly horrific in its very realism), it nonetheless contains one of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen on film. No spoiler here, but let’s just say that it involves the title character and an infant.