The Thousands

Catherine Hardwicke really gets teenage girls’ yearnings to be acknowledged as special and have dramas pivot voluptuously around them. Red Riding Hood will disappoint those hoping for an explicitly psychosexual adult fairytale, but even in its silliest moments (and there are plenty of those) it reflects an adolescent’s desire to feel endangered yet cherished. In a deliriously cartoonish village, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) loves humble woodcutter Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) but is promised to wealthy blacksmith Henry (Max ‘Son of Jeremy’ Irons). When a wolf kills Valerie’s sister, local cleric Father Auguste (Lukas Haas) summons werewolf-hunting superpriest Father Solomon (Gary Oldman).

This Hercule Poirot of the American-accented, pseudo-medieval world promptly turns the villagers’ suspicions on one another. But whoever the wolf is, Valerie knows it wants her… Red Riding Hood is never entirely satisfying, but its fetishistic focus on eyes is intriguing. Both the plot and the Twilight-esque tone require a cavalcade of meaningful stares, notably while Karin Dreijer Andersson wails. Not even a shonky iron wolf mask can veil Seyfried’s luminous peepers! Despite Red Riding Hood‘s shortcomings, Hardwicke grasps that, for girls, the inarticulate violence and eroticism of the gaze may be the safest form of subversion.