Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980
=== Red Riding 1974 ===
Director: Julian Jarrold
Technique: 16 mm film with an aspect ratio of 16:9
Run time: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Rating: 3.07m
1974. Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) is a cocky and naïve cub reporter for The Yorkshire Post. John Dawson (Sean Bean) is an unscrupulous local real estate developer. Their paths cross when Dunford investigates a series of murdered or missing girls, one of whom is found on Dawson's property, tortured, raped, and strangled, with swan wings stitched into her back. Dawson has bought the help of the West Yorkshire Constabulary (WYC) and the local councillors, the latter allowing him to purchase land and gain permission for construction of a shopping centre. The Romani camp on the land is burned down, supposedly accidentally.
Dunford is spurred on by comments from people, including his friend Barry Gannon (Anthony Flanagan), the latter warned of trouble and then killed in an accident. An elusive male prostitute, B.J. (Robert Sheehan) passes incriminating materials gathered by Gannon about local officials. Dunford believes that during the investigation of Gannon's death he has found a friend in reform, a young police officer. Dunford also becomes romantically involved with a missing girl's mother, Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall). He also learns from her that she is both sexually involved with Dawson and has known him all her life.
Dunford ignores corrupt WYC officers' threats to lay off the story, including keeping away from Dawson's institutionalised wife. Despite being beaten twice, he continues, eventually being arrested and tortured after storming into Dawson's private house party. During the police interrogation, he is shown the dead body of Paula. The Gannon materials are passed to the officer he thought a friend but eventually they are given to Detective Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) who has them destroyed. After a last brutal torture by police officers, Tommy Douglas (Tony Mooney) and Bob Craven (Sean Harris) give Dunford a loaded gun to do their business and abandon him in a desolate area.
Bloody and frantic, Dunford seeks out Dawson at his house to no avail, instead finding him at his establishment – the Karachi Club. Two of his henchmen are shot; then he confronts Dawson about the murders. Dawson offers that he was "no angel" and that he had "a private weakness", implying that he is somehow connected to the murders and missing girls. Dunford shoots Dawson dead and flees south in his car, but reverses course when he finds himself chased by police cars, deliberately driving toward the pursuing police cars; a vision of Paula appears to him before his death in the ensuing collision.
=== Red Riding 1980 ===
Director: James Marsh
Technique: 35 mm film with an anamorphic aspect ratio of 2.35:1
Run time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Rating: 1.99m
In 1980, following public outcry over the failure to catch the Yorkshire Ripper, a "squeaky clean" Manchester police detective, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), is assigned to travel to West Yorkshire to head the WYC investigation, much to the chagrin of the former head, Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke). Hunter had previously worked on the Karachi Club massacre, a case he had to abandon due to his wife Joan's miscarriage. One member of Hunter's new, hand-picked team is Helen Marshall (Maxine Peake), his former adulterous lover. The two cases – massacre and serial killings – are linked by Officer Bob Craven (Sean Harris), who behaves in an openly hostile manner to the new team. Hunter correctly deduces that the Ripper inquiry is being side-tracked by the Wearside Jack tapes, and feels that the real Ripper has been interviewed and missed.
Hunter suspects that one of the Ripper's supposed victims, Clare Strachan, was not actually a Ripper victim. Hunter receives information on the murder from B.J., who is introduced through Reverend Laws (Peter Mullan). B.J. claims that Strachan was a prostitute working for Eric Hall, a now-dead WYC policeman. Hall's wife requests that Hunter meet her, and after visiting her house – where Reverend Laws is also present – she provides Hunter with proof of Hall's work as a pimp and pornographer, and that she gave Hall's documents to Jobson. Jobson claims to have lost the files. Meanwhile, the former affair between Hunter and Marshall threatens to reignite.
Hunter interrogates Inspectors Dickie Alderman and Jim Prentice, who lets slip that the Strachan murder was probably performed by Hall, covered-up to look like a Ripper murder. Hunter also visits the now debilitated Tommy Douglas who later phones him demanding that they meet at his house. However, Hunter arrives to find Douglas and his daughter killed. Hunter is seriously intimidated when he receives covertly taken photos of himself and Marshall in compromising positions.
Near the end of Hunter's Christmas holiday, his Manchester house is burned down. Hunter then learns that his superiors have taken him off the Ripper case due to unspecified allegations of disciplinary breaches. He returns to West Yorkshire for a scheduled meeting with Jobson, but it appears, amid great fanfare, that the Yorkshire Ripper has been captured. The suspect confesses to all murders except that of Strachan, which he explicitly denies.
Hunter tracks down B.J. and forces him to reveal that five masked policemen burst into the Karachi Club minutes after Eddie Dunford's revenge, killing all civilian survivors and finding Bob Craven and Tommy Douglas wounded by Eddie. Strachan a waiter at the club, and her friend B.J. witnessed the whole scene while hiding behind the bar, and were spotted by Angus and Craven as they fled the premises. B.J. is, therefore, the only surviving witness of the Karachi Club massacre, which forces him to flee town. B.J. also implies that Craven was the murderer of Strachan.
Hunter returns to Millgarth Station, Leeds, to reveal this new information to Detective Chief Superintendent John Nolan (Tony Pitts). Nolan takes Hunter downstairs to the cells where Hunter enters to see Craven slouched back in a chair, shot through his head. He realises that Nolan was one of the five who took part in the Karachi Club shootings, but Nolan quickly shoots him dead. Alderman and Prentice plant the gun to make it look like Hunter and Craven shot each other. In a final scene, Joan Hunter is comforted by Reverend Laws at her husband's graveside.
=== Red Riding 1983 ===
Director: Anand Tucker
Technique: taped with a Red One digital camera
Run time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Rating: 2.05m
In 1983, Detective Inspector Maurice Jobson is plagued by guilt over his reluctant participation in the corrupt activities within the WYC. It is revealed that it was he who tipped off Dunford about the arson in the Roma camp near Hunslet, in which Jobson took part under pressure by Molloy. It is also revealed that the camp site had to be vacated to pursue a £100M joint investment between Dawson and the top echelons of the WYC (including Jobson, Molloy, Angus, Alderman, Prentice, Nolan, Douglas and Craven) on a project for a commercial center. It is also revealed that he knew about the innocence of Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays), a mentally retarded man who was accused of the serial killings in 1974. Jobson is aware of a conspiracy within the WYC protecting high-profile figures, including Dawson, from public exposure. Jobson's pangs of conscience are brought upon by his investigation into the recent disappearance of a young girl named Hazel Atkins, and lead him to open previous cases. He also starts an intimate relationship with a medium (Saskia Reeves), who seems to be in possession of valuable information concerning the more recent crimes.
Meanwhile, John Piggott (Mark Addy), a solicitor and the son of a notorious WYC officer, decides to explore the Atkins case himself. His inquiries lead him to Leonard Cole (Gerard Kearns), the young man who found the swan-stitched victim in 1974 and who is now being framed for Atkins' disappearance. Cole is tortured and murdered by the police, his death disguised as a suicide. Using information given by Myshkin, Piggott finds a mine shaft hidden in a pigeon shed near Laws' home, where it is revealed that a paedophile and child-murdering ring was run in West Yorkshire by Reverend Laws, and that clients of this ring included significant figures of society, among them businessmen such as Dawson and policemen such as Piggott's own father.
It is implied that only when children with known, stable local families were abducted did the criminal structure run the risk of being made public. This was the main reason for the constables' indirect assistance in Dawson's demise, thereby solving the "two little problems" referred to by Angus (a nosy young journalist and a businessman with a dark secret) at the same time without compromising their million-pound investment on the commercial center. It is clear that, at least after 1974, Laws counted on the complicity and even direct collaboration of high-ranking officials in the WYC, although the extent of his grip on the police, the reasons why he did not share a fate similar to Dawson's and the degree of knowledge WYC brass had of his and Dawson's activities prior to 1974 are left open to speculation.
Finally, it is also revealed that B.J. was the first child abducted by this criminal enterprise, and perhaps the only one who survived. He ends up returning to Laws' home to enact revenge, but in the last moment finds himself unable to do so due to Laws' mind-numbing, domineering influence on him. Seconds before Laws is about to drill into B.J.'s head with an electrical drill, Jobson appears with a shotgun and shoots the reverend three times, killing him. He then opens the hidden entrance to the mine shaft just in time for Piggott to emerge from it with a still-living Hazel Atkins in his arms. B.J. flees southward by train, reflecting on his upbringing, his experiences, and his "escape" from the past of West Yorkshire. Thus three characters – Jobson, Piggott and B.J. — achieve some measure of redemption in the end.
violence, murder