Red Riding had its world première at FrightFest, Glasgow Film Festival, 7 March 2026
“While we are shaped by our DNA, it doesn’t necessarily define us.”
These words, spoken by a high school teacher near the beginning of Craig Conway’s feature debut Red Riding, are missed by its teen protagonist. For Redele Riding (Victoria Tait), whose nickname and surname lend the film its evocative title, naps through her genetics class and is then sent home for her inattention and insubordination. It is a pity, really – for the teacher’s lesson practically represents a statement of thematic intent for Red’s own story, in a film that will be preoccupied with the complex interplay between nature and nurture.
Certainly aggressive, unruly Red is worried about legacy – more specifically about becoming like her mother Scarlet (Sam Banks-Copping), a one-armed junkie who can barely look after herself let alone her daughter, and who spends her time in their London council estate flat strung out on heroin and barely conscious. “I’m nothing like her,” is Red’s refrain, as she rejects the model that Scarlet represents, while others notice her resemblance – and not just a physical one – to her mother. Yet when, after babbling to Red that her arm was eaten by a wolf, Scarlet dies of an overdose, Red will leave for a different kind of estate – palatial grounds in the Scottish Highlands where her sole remaining family lives – and will discover that there is nobility alongside bestiality in her bloodline. Yet as a stranger (Ian Whyte) prowls the estate’s precinct, Red is also about to learn at first hand the reason why Scarlet emerged from this place an empty shell of trauma and addiction and never, ever came back.
If Red is conflicted about her inheritance, and wonders where the different parts of her personality come from, Red Riding makes much play of its own confused genealogy. For while the title, a red cape and repeated references to a man-eating wolf all point to the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood (and indeed the folklorists Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm are expressly acknowledged in the closing credits as inspirations for screenwriter Peter Stylianou), there are other allusions here that serve to muddy the waters.
The posters for missing locals – mostly children – might suggest something more akin to David Pearce’s Red Riding Quartet of novels (1999-2002) or Channel 4’s three-part TV adaptation (2009) of the same name, both concerned with serial killings and police corruption. Red’s grandmother (Lynsey Beauchamp) is literally called ‘Lady Penelope’, as though to suggest that she embodies the sort of upper-class benevolence of her namesake from television’s Thunderbirds (1965-66). And when Red announces her intention to bicycle to the nearby town, the maid Mary (Jenny Quinn) warns her to “stay on the road, keep out of the woods”, as though this were a ‘wild country’ reimagining of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981). All these intertexts serve as much to confound as to clarify, as Red Riding proves to be full of red herrings, with its own twisted mythology no less intradiegetic than imposed from the outside.
While Red Riding is a film about bad blood, social divisions, and the inherited stain of family, it also concerns Red’s bloody coming of age, as she determines where she has come from, who she is, and how she wishes to define herself. Whether her final actions prove that she has broken with, or merely clung to, her messy genetic tradition is left for the viewer to disentangle. Meanwhile Conway’s first film stalks confidently through the backwoods of Britain’s class system, exposing a world where the landed gentry, and “the animals” who reside beyond their protected properties, live by very different rules, but are perhaps otherwise rather similar. There is a lesson in here that the viewer had best not miss.
strap: Craig Conway’s feature debut makes a contemporary coming-of-age folktale of bad genes, class clash and the bestial stain of family
© Anton Bitel
