A binge watching of RED RIDING TRILOGY, three TV movies adapted from David Peace's RED RIDING QUARTET, where its second chapter 1977 is skipped. Directed by three different directors in three different formats: 1974 by Julian Jarrold in 16mm film, 1980 by James Marsh in 35mm film and 1983 by Anand Tucked with Red One digital camera, the trilogy forebodingly trawls into the organized crimes and police corruption in West Yorkshire through the prisms of three different protagonists while they are wrestling with a series of murder cases, and overall, it inspires to achieve a vérité similitude of the bleak milieu while sometimes being mired with its own navel- gazing, such as narrative banality (1974), over-calculated formality (1980) and poorly indicated flashback sequences (1983).
In 1974, the bright-young-thing Eddie Dunford (Garfield) is an ambitious crime reporter for The Yorkshire Post, who takes it on himself to probe three similar cases of missing or murdered teenage girls, which puts his own life on the line. He hits every nook and cranny of procedural clichés, from losing a dear colleague Barry Gannon (Flanagan). who knows too much of the dirty business (after being inauspiciously warned about his own safety) nevertheless withholds crucial information from Eddie, to the police's porous covering-up of the culprit with a scapegoat Michael Myshkin (Mays), until Eddie meets Paul Garland (Hall), who channels a shopworn ambiguity between a grieved damsel-in-distress and an inscrutable gangster's moll, whom he incurably falls in love with. Finally his path comes across with John Dawson (Bean), a local real estate magnate, and after succumbs to an excruciating reality check signed by both Dawson and police force, Eddie despondently realizes he cannot save nobody, a final vigilante bloodbath is his last gamble to right the wrong in the only option he is left with (again, manipulated). The movie is shot in subdued retro-sheen, Garfield fleshes out Eddie's fix with absorbing commitment, and Hall is magnificent to behold in her blond charisma.
