RED RIDING Review

Redele Riding (Victoria Tait) has been expelled from school and is doing her best to hold things together. She's living with her one-armed mother, Scarlet who is slowly disappearing into her heroin addiction.

When Scarlet finally overdoses, Red is left with no money, no plan, and no options.

She gets sent to live with her estranged grandmother Penelope (Lynsey Beauchamp), a Scottish aristocrat with a large estate in the Highlands. It's about as far from Red's London flat as you can get, and on the surface, it looks like things might actually work out for once.

It doesn't take long for Red to realize that something isn't right. The housekeeper Mary (Jenny Quinn) is cagey, unwilling to answer even the most basic questions about the estate or the family. Like how did her mother really lose her arm?

The gamekeeper Malcolm (Bill Fellows) pulls Red aside and makes it very clear: stay on the road and out of the woods.

All throughout the village there are missing children posters that nobody seems particularly eager to discuss.

The more Red digs, the more questions she uncovers.

A family member long assumed to be dead turns out to be very much alive.

Then the dreams start. Her mother. A missing boy. Both pointing her in the same direction.

Red knows full well what Malcolm told her.

She heads into the woods anyway.

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Red Riding has its moments, and Victoria Tait is the best of them. She's given a character that could have easily come across as just another troubled teen and instead brings a real weight and watchability to the role. Every scene she's in, you're with her. Lynsey Beauchamp matches her beat for beat as the grandmother Penelope, bringing a quiet, unsettling creepiness to the role that is hard to shake. The two of them together are the best thing the film has going for it.

Setting the whole thing on a Scottish estate was also a smart call. It gives Red Riding an almost gothic feel from start to finish, and on more than one occasion it's the atmosphere doing the heavy lifting when the story isn't quite pulling its weight.

Which brings us to the second act.

There are threads that feel genuinely promising early on that just get dropped without explanation. You can see what the film is reaching for and you want it to get there. It just never does. For a horror film built around a "wolf", the lack of blood and gore only adds to that feeling of a film that isn't fully committing to what it wants to be.

Somewhere there's a version of this movie that really leans into all of it.

This isn't that version.

However, what saves it is that Red Riding never tries to be a straight retelling of the fairy tale. It's very much its own thing, and director Craig Conway deserves credit for that. For a first feature, taking a story this well known and finding a genuinely fresh angle on it is no small feat.

Is Red Riding going to be the horror film of the year? No.

But Craig Conway has announced himself as a director worth keeping an eye on, and Victoria Tait is a name you're going to want to remember.

🍿 SCORE = 60 / 100