To the North, where we do what we want

Red Riding (1980)

Crit

James Marsh directed part 2, starring Paddy Considine as a detective ostensibly assigned to solve the case of the Yorkshire Ripper but in fact set up to fail. He hastens his failure by connecting the case to that of the Karachi Club murders of 1974--which we saw in part 1 . . . sort of.
What we sort of know from part 1 becomes a teasing theme through the latter two parts, as we learn more about what we really didn't know, and still aren't altogether sure about.
We are sure, however, and remain sure, that at the center of everything is grotesque and indomitable police corruption, against which the merely privately guilty (no one being innocent) are powerless.

Red Riding (1983)

Crit

And we return to little girls missing, or one little girl, rather--which is particularly disconcerting inasmuch as we thought we knew that had come to an end in '74. David Morrissey plays a cop and Mark Addy a lawyer both of whom have just enough vestigial spine left to want to undo what their general spinelessness has allowed to transpire. Anand Tucker plays faster and looser with chronology than either of the other directors, demanding that you remember who's dead to be sure when we're not in the present.
To say that everything is explained at the end would be a gross overstatement, and a disservice to a document that wears its ambiguity proudly, but it does hang together in the end, mostly. Whatever you do, though, don't watch it out of order; more than once today I thought how lost I would be without having seen 1974 first, and that principle was reinforced when the one person with me in the audience for 1983 (yesterday was also a 2-person audience, and at 1980 we were 6, I believe), who had seen 1980 with me but had not yet seen part 1, grilled me on the way out. And now, looking at IMDb, I see that I grossly misled him on one matter of fact, having been grossly misled myself by my own assumption.