Movie reviews

The Company of Wolves: Granny has a story to wrap you in

Neil Jordan and Angela Carter turn Little Red Riding Hood into a struggle over the stories meant to keep a girl safe. The red cape comes with instructions.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

The Company of Wolves gives its warnings a handmade quality. Angela Lansbury's granny tells frightening stories while knitting a red cape from an enormous ball of yarn. It is an excellent image of care becoming instruction: here is something to keep you warm, and here is a version of the world to wear with it. The trouble begins when the recipient gets curious about what the warning leaves out.

Neil Jordan's 1984 film, co-written with Angela Carter from material in The Bloody Chamber, builds its Little Red Riding Hood variations around Rosaleen's dreams. Stories sit inside other stories; a bedroom gives way to a village and woods. That arrangement matters because Granny's account of danger is one voice inside a larger imaginative space. The film can take her seriously without making her the only possible authority.

A protective story can get tight

Granny's advice gives uncertainty a reassuring shape: stay on the path, recognize the suspicious man, keep your distance. Even the gap between a man's eyebrows becomes evidence. It is a tempting system. You could memorize the signs and stop having to judge anyone for yourself. The film's bodily transformations make that promise particularly unreliable. Human appearance is hardly a permanent arrangement here.

The warnings need not be entirely wrong to be incomplete. There is violence in this world, and curiosity is no magical guarantee of safety. The more interesting conflict is over who gets to interpret the danger. A story can teach someone to notice a threat while also teaching them to distrust their own questions. Lansbury's busy, domestic storyteller makes that combination more persuasive than a simple villain delivering rules would be.

The body refuses the label

The transformations give those questions an unpleasant physical form. In one, Stephen Rea's character tears away the skin of his face as he becomes a beast. Becoming a wolf involves the destruction of a familiar surface. That is much more useful to this story than simply handing the monster a better disguise. The image makes a stable division between respectable human and dangerous animal difficult to maintain.

The practical work is also part of the film's bargain with its audience. Bodies are constructed, altered, and pulled apart in front of us. If visible fabrication breaks a film's spell for you, this approach may be a hurdle. Admiring an effect's ingenuity does not oblige anyone to find it frightening. Its value here is the sense that a body can become as changeable as a storyteller's description of it.

The woods have been made to mean something

Anton Furst's largely studio-built forest belongs to that same imaginative system. The BFI describes handmade trees mounted on rollers so they could turn to suggest changing seasons. The production detail is a useful reminder that a convincing fantasy need not conceal every trace of arrangement. These woods can work like an illustration: selected shapes organizing a feeling, rather than a landscape required to account for every mile beyond the frame.

Choose this for a Gothic fairy tale with bodily consequences and a deliberately wandering structure. Anyone wanting a brisk werewolf hunt with fixed rules may find the nested tales frustrating. For the literary counterpart, start with our review of The Bloody Chamber; our White Reindeer review offers another difficult relationship between transformation and freedom. The Company of Wolves earns its strangeness by making protection, storytelling, and control share the same knitting basket.

Questions from the crypt

Is The Company of Wolves based on a novel?

It draws on Angela Carter's short fiction in The Bloody Chamber rather than a novel. Carter and Neil Jordan co-wrote the screenplay, expanding the material into connected dreams and tales.

Is The Company of Wolves a conventional werewolf movie?

It includes gruesome werewolf transformations, but its structure is closer to a dark fairy-tale collection. Expect dreams, stories within stories, and questions about warnings and growing up rather than a single straightforward monster hunt.

Why do listings give The Company of Wolves different runtimes?

The BFI catalogue lists 95 minutes. The BBFC records a 95-minute cinema submission and several home-video versions around 91 minutes. Check the specific edition; a different listed runtime alone does not establish which scenes, if any, differ.

Sources & further reading

Keep reading