Synopsis
An adaptation of Angela Carter's fairy tales. Young Rosaleen dreams of a village in the dark woods, where Granny tells her cautionary tales in which innocent maidens are tempted by wolves who are hairy on the inside. As Rosaleen grows into womanhood, will the wolves come for her too?
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Cast
- Sarah PattersonRosaleen
- Angela LansburyGranny
- David WarnerFather
- Graham CrowdenOld Priest
- Brian GloverAmorous Boy's Father
- Kathryn PogsonYoung Bride
- Stephen ReaYoung Groom
- Tusse SilbergMother
- Micha BergeseHunstman
- Georgia SloweAlice
Recommendations
- 100
TV Guide Magazine
The most innovative, intelligent, and visually sumptuous horror film of recent years. - 90
Time Out
Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years. - 83
The A.V. Club
A lush, ambitious, strikingly outsized play on Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood that makes explicit the dangers of a budding young woman straying from the path. - 80
The New York Times
It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales. - 80
Los Angeles Times
By the time this distinctive 1986 film is over we have been treated to a lavish fugue on the themes of childhood, wolves, eroticism and myth. [11 Jun 1989, p.2] - 75
Chicago Sun-Times
It is not a children's film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of Little Red Riding Hood. - 60
Variety
Admirably attempting an adult approach to traditional fairy tale material, The Company of Wolves nevertheless represents an uneasy marriage between old-fashioned storytelling and contemporary screen explicitness. - 60
Empire
It is a complex and at times infuriating structure — it often helps to conceive of the film as the book of short stories it stems from — but simultaneously vivid and disturbing.
