The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)

A strange and heady blend of postmodern art film about storytelling, fairy tale, and folk tale, YA tween movie for and about girls dealing with puberty, and full-on '80s flesh-ripping horror, The Company of Wolves confused audiences on initial release before becoming a popular cult film. It also confused my friends and I when we rented it in junior high expecting some traditional werewolf action. I have since grown up (mostly) and become much more interested in the lives and experiences of women and girls and the art they make, but in late '80s/early '90s small town Midwest U.S.A., where gender roles were (intentionally and unintentionally) fixed, frozen in place, and rigidly adhered to, a movie about the internal lives of girls using fairy tale imagery and metaphor and featuring a major role for the Murder, She Wrote lady was pretty baffling for four 13-year-old boys hoping for An American Werewolf in London part two.

Watching it again at the age of 45 (how can this happen? how could this happen?), I was much more receptive to and excited by the film than when I was going through my own puberty hell and convinced by society that girls' interests and experiences were silly compared to my own. What a stupid world we live in sometimes.

Neil Jordan's second film as director, The Company of Wolves was adapted from several short stories in Angela Carter's 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber, with Carter and Jordan collaborating on the screenplay. (After reading up on the fascinating life of Angela Carter, I am excited to read some of her work.) Carter's book was advertised by its American publisher as "adult fairy tales," a phrase Carter despised, considering it a fundamental misunderstanding of what she was trying to do. Instead of making these tales more adult, Carter said she was attempting instead to "extract the latent content from the stories." This approach carries over to the film, which clearly exists in a fairy tale world but also expresses the moments fairy tales hint at, imply, or conceal.

Beginning in what appears to be the present in an English country house, the film makes the unusual move of revealing from the near-beginning that we are watching a dream in the sleeping mind of 12-year-old Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson). Audiences in the '80s, given too many "it was all a dream" endings, may have been turned off by this approach, but lazy viewers such as myself and my fellow 13-year-old bros are missing the forest for the trees in getting upset about this narrative device. The Company of Wolves is concerned with the subconscious, the inner life, the storytelling tradition and its effects on shaping societal roles, physical transformation, and the dreamlife bleeding into the waking world, so having the narrative exist within a dream shouldn't be a deal-breaker here. Never mind that there is something surreally "off" about Rosaleen and her bedroom, and the forest outside her window. The boundaries between these worlds are not as clearly delineated as we'd like to believe, the movie repeatedly tells us.

The main narrative thread (the dream) is a composite of several short stories in Carter's book, mostly inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, and the characters within this thread also tell stories of their own (adapted from other Bloody Chamber stories), creating a complex stories-within-a-dream-within-a-story structure. Jordan and Carter keep excellent control of this tricky tone, and the movie never runs away from them.

Rosaleen's modern English family are transformed into fairy tale characters in the dream, living in a fairy tale past in a storybook village near a dangerous forest full of wolves (and werewolves). Rosaleen is warned repeatedly by her grandmother (Angela Lansbury) to stay on the path, and that wolves can't be trusted, particularly the other kind of wolf that presents as a man. Rosaleen is skeptical of her grandmother's warnings and curious about the world of boys, men, and wolves. She frequently veers off the path, causing her family, who already lost their oldest daughter to wolves, much worry. When she finally meets a huntsman (Micha Bergese) in the woods, the film's skill at both meeting and subverting expectations reaches its height.

I'm not going to attempt a smarty-pants lecture about what the film is really about, but I will say that it gives you a whole lot to chew on about coming of age, repression and expression of women's sexuality, the role of storytelling in enforcing and subverting traditional roles, patriarchy and the complicity of some women in enforcing their own submission and repression, and the inner life versus the external one.

Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair) was dealing with a much smaller budget than he'd have to work with on many later projects, but he creates a compelling visual world to frame Carter's ideas. Like the story and its themes, Jordan's sets and images feel both viscerally real and artificially heightened, and the werewolf transformation scenes are weird, wild, and gruesome.

The nature of the project means that there is some distance and remove between the characters and the audience, but Jordan makes it all connect in honest, human ways. It also doesn't hurt that he's got a pretty fine cast to bring it to life. In addition to the recently deceased Lansbury (RIP), we also get the recently deceased David Warner (RIP), Jordan regular Stephen Rea, Kathryn Pogson, Brian Glover, a great cameo from Terence Stamp, and, in her only film role, cult musician Danielle Dax as a naked wolfwoman. The Company of Wolves is a gem and way better than I remembered it.