Three-parter ‘Red Riding’ has haunting effect

The powerfully disturbing “Red Riding Trilogy” will haunt you waking and sleeping, night and day. If you survive the watching of it, that is, which is no easy thing.

It’s not the five hours-plus length of this trio of devastatingly bleak modern British noir films that’s daunting. Far from it.

Strongly made by three different directors with three different crews, but using scripts from the same writer and the same cast for its recurring characters, these films are put together with so much ability and skill that the time simply melts away.

What makes these merciless films at times almost unbearable to watch also makes them frankly impossible to get out of your mind. Not only do they create a gritty, compelling world thick with the fetid air of venality, corruption and desperation, but they also periodically traffic in ghastly and horrific torture – sometimes shown, sometimes merely described, but always circling back to a series of sadistic, soul-destroying murders of women and little girls.

All this and more comes from a series of intense, chaotic novels by David Peace that in turn was inspired by events surrounding northern England’s real-life Yorkshire Ripper murders.

Each novel is named after a year, but when the film title comes up on-screen, the phrase “In the Year of Our Lord” is added, as if to ironically remind us that we are entering a world where godly behavior is going to be difficult to find.

The first part, “1974,” directed by Julian Jarrold, follows cocky and ambitious young Yorkshire Post crime reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) as he starts to suspect that the torture deaths of little girls over several years could be linked.

His investigations lead him to surly chief detective Billy “The Badger” Molloy (Warren Clarke), powerful developer John Dawson (Sean Bean), local vicar Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), mysterious rent boy BJ (Robert Sheehan) and the beautiful, haunted young widow Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall). But no good will come of it, no good at all.

Directed by James Marsh, the second part, “1980,” involves a second series of murders, the ghastly Ripper attacks on women.

The Home Office, worried about the pace of the Yorkshire Police investigation, sends in a key operative from Manchester, Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), to try and figure out what’s going on. He comes up against a resentful, resistant police culture, typified by the sadistic detective Bob Craven (Sean Harris).

“How deep does the rot go?” Hunter wonders. “Who stops it?”

Attempting to answer that question, the third part, Anand Tucker’s “1983,” follows two characters, solicitor John Piggott (Mark Addy) and top cop Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), as both are compelled against their better judgment and even their self-interest to stanch the flood of corruption, to attempt to get to the source of evil that always seems just out of reach.

Though the sadism and torture laced throughout the “Red Riding” trilogy is only fitfully present, when it does arrive it is graphic and upsetting enough to make watching this exceptionally well-made series very much of a devil’s bargain.

You take the risk, and hope the price you pay is worth it. Which, given the agonizing subject matter, is perhaps just as it should be.

The “Red Riding Trilogy” films are playing separately at the Magic Lantern Theatre.