Based on David Peace’s cult novels about the far-reaching tentacles of the corrupt West Yorkshire police force in the ’70s and ’80s, Red Riding hits theaters as an anomic, must-see trilogy.

“Dickens on bad acid” is the phrase used by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to pithily describe the sprawling, paranoiac nature of the telefilms he wrote for Channel 4 in the UK. This inky triptych nears Bacon-esque nightmarishness and ravishment, with each part helmed by a different talent shooting in a different format. Together, Julian Jarrold (gritty 16mm), James Marsh (elegant 35mm), and Anand Tucker (immersive widescreen) magnificently exhume a past in which the cutthroat police have a members-only toast: “To the North, where we do what we want.”

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And now for something totally different from The A-Team. The Red Riding Trilogy, which originally aired on Channel 4 in the UK, is a cinematic work composed of three feature-length films, each directed by an established filmmaker — Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited), James Marsh (Man on Wire) and Anand Tucker (Shopgirl) — and based on four novels by David Peace. (These are in turn loosely based on the real-life crimes of a man known as the Yorkshire Ripper.)

The trailer is pretty scary, although in a dramatic, modern noir way — there’s not a lot of gore, just a lot of dead bodies. That said, we’re trying to imagine what five hours of this kind of intensity will do to our blood pressure.

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