Neil Jordan has evinced a career-spanning interest in genre filmmaking—a predilection that first manifested with his sophomore effort, The Company of Wolves. For this film, Jordan worked alongside writer Angela Carter to adapt a story from her celebrated collection The Bloody Chamber, which consists of bold and often brutal reworkings of classic fairy tales (here it’s Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”) that sought to, as Carter put it, “extract the latent content of the traditional stories.” The resulting film is strange and dreamlike, symbolic and highly stylized, and definitely not for small children.
Taking its cue from Wojciech Has’s surrealist masterwork The Saragossa Manuscript, the film unfolds as a series of tales told by various characters, sometimes amounting to nested tales, starting from a frame narrative set in the modern day. Events begin with an adolescent girl, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), deep in restless sleep. We watch as her family arrives at a country house, take note of the décor of the place, in particular the childish things that litter Rosaleen’s bedroom. All of these elements will recur within Rosaleen’s dream life. The key to it all, in a metaphorical sense, is a book nestled on Rosaleen’s pillow, next to her sleeping head, titled The Shattered Dream.
Jordan renders the world of Rosaleen’s dreams in a willfully artificial fashion, using his control over the sets at Shepperton Studios to craft a rich and strange vision for the archetypal provincial village and surrounding dark woods that closely resembles the work of famous illustrators of fairy tales like Arthur Rackham and Kai Nielsen. The centerpiece of the town is an oddly mechanized well (perhaps intended as a reminder of the Industrial Revolution) that features prominently in one of Rosaleen’s tales, where it provides access to the underworld. Jordan also includes an animal of some sort in nearly every shot, both to suggest their often emblematic value in fairy tales, and to emphasize our closeness to the natural world.
Jordan and Carter use the progression of tales to chart Rosaleen’s growing awareness of her blossoming womanhood, along with her ability to adopt the role of storyteller herself, an assumption of agency that’s key to the film’s revisionist nature. The stories told to her by her Granny (Angela Lansbury) are cautionary warnings against the inherently bestial nature of men, like the one about a young groom (Stephen Rea) who abandons his bride (Kathryn Pogson) on their wedding night in order to heed the call of nature (amusingly depicted both by his need to piss as well as the distant sounds of a wolfpack). His return to home and hearth once she’s established a new family bodes only bitterness and bloodshed.
Rosaleen’s ultimate confrontation with the Big Bad Wolf doesn’t play out as it does in the original “Little Red Riding Hood.” For one, both the wolf and the huntsman (the traditional rescuer of the distressed damsel) are one and the same, indicating that there’s no escape from the man who has hair on his insides, as Granny puts it. Rather than try to destroy man’s bestial element, Rosaleen succeeds in taming it, not only through her unafraid embrace of the beast that he becomes when injured, but also through her ability to fashion a tale out of her newfound feelings. Whereas Rosaleen’s earlier story told to her mother focused on the witchy woman and her revenge for being jilted, in The Company of Wolves she emphasizes compassion and a feeling of camaraderie with the outcast: her desire, in a word, to run with the hunted.
The biggest difference between what we see here and Carter’s initial conception of the film has to do with the ending. Carter had Rosaleen, upon waking, diving off her bed into her bedroom floor, thus willingly plunging into the symbolic waters of the unconscious. Instead, The Company of Wolves in its finished form ends with figures from her dreams—the wolfpack to which the dream Rosaleen belongs—invading Rosaleen’s country house and smashing their way into her bedroom, which terrifies the newly awakened young woman. True, Jordan has paved the way for this denouement with The Shattered Dream, but it seems like the diametric opposite of Carter’s unabashed embrace of the unconscious, a reassertion of the realm of the real. Whether or not you view this as a blow against Carter’s radical surrealist agenda, Jordan’s film is nonetheless a delightfully perverse reworking of the traditional fairy tale.
Image/Sound
This release of The Company of Wolves includes both a 2160p UHD and a 1080p HD disc, each sporting a new 4K restoration made from the original camera negative. The HDR disc improves on the already great-looking Blu-ray in the anticipated ways: increased depth and clarity of the image, brighter colors, and better supported black levels. The Master Audio stereo track is clean and clear, and adeptly conveys George Fenton’s wonderfully eclectic and atmospheric score.
Extras
Carried over from the 2005 DVD, Neil Jordan’s commentary track covers his collaboration with author Angela Carter, his visual and narrative inspirations, shooting entirely on set in Shepperton Studios, working with first-time performers, the virtues of practical effects, and the film’s ongoing legacy. The new commentary track stitches together contributions from producer Chris Brown, sculptor Dick Budden, Carter biographer Edmund Gordon, and actors Kathryn Pogson and Micha Bergese. Despite some occasional audio hiccups, it’s an informative listen, especially for the fascinating tidbits on production designer Anton Furst, and the difference of opinion between Carter and Jordan about the film’s ending. The interview with composer George Fenton goes into his work on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, drawing inspiration from Ravel, and his ideas for individual music cues, including clips from the movie by way of illustration. A brief interview with actress Georgia Slowe touches on her interest in the writing of Angela Carter, impressions of the vast set, being nailed into a cramped coffin, and her feelings about the finished film. Also included are a theatrical trailer and a TV spot.
Overall
A dark and disturbing fairy tale for adults, Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves makes its domestic Blu-ray debut in lustrous-looking UHD and HD, with a solid roster of bonus materials.
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