A red hooded coat – that fairy tale trope of Little Red Riding Hood – gains an ominous significance in Nicolas Roeg’s masterful thriller. Based on a novella by Daphne du Maurier, the film tells of a married couple coming to terms with their daughter’s accidental death by drowning. The girl’s red coat and its colour (red being the colour of blood) become the principal indicators of mental time travel, which takes on the form of traumatic flashbacks and sinister premonitions. Here Roeg excels in generating multiple senses of disorientation that are temporal as well as spatial.
UK, Italy 1973. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. With Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason. Costumes Marit Allen.