The first two adaptations of David Peace’s novels have been characterised by a stylistic dualism.  Their foregrounds are both occupied by more of less convincing Crime tropes.  Searches for murderers, attempts to ferret out corrupt cops, investigations of conspiracies and doomed love stories.  However, the meat of these two films lay not in the foreground, but in the background.  Red Riding : 1974 and 1980 were films whose visuals spoke of an encroaching and slowly expanding evil.  An evil that slowly becomes systemic before taking on almost mythological proportions.  Visually the films gave us an image of the North as a Garden of Eden fallen into the worst kind of sin.  Red Riding : 1983 undoes a lot of that work by using words to fill in beautiful cracks and gaps left by powerful images.  Its obsession with salvation seems naïve and very much like a cop out.  However, the sheer banality of 1983’s evil has a power of its own.

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