Every decade coughs up a movie that critics pretend is “deep” so they don’t have to admit they were bored stiff. In the 1980s, that film was The Company of Wolves—Neil Jordan’s Gothic fantasy horror about werewolves, womanhood, and eyebrows that meet in the middle. It’s part art film, part horror, and mostly a lecture dressed in sheep’s clothing. Or wolf’s clothing. Or whatever pile of pelts the budget department found lying around.
Fairy Tales for Insomniacs
The story—or more accurately, the fever dream that cosplays as one—follows Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), a girl who dreams herself into a fairytale forest that looks like it was borrowed from a BBC Christmas special. Her sister gets eaten by wolves, her parents mourn in silence (and likely relief), and she goes to live with her grandmother, played by Angela Lansbury. Yes, that Angela Lansbury. Murder She Wrote herself, wandering around a set full of papier-mâché trees, knitting red shawls, and warning her granddaughter never to trust a man with a unibrow. Sound advice in real life, sure, but not quite the kind of storytelling that grips an audience by the jugular.
From there, the film mutates into an anthology of embedded stories: a wolfish groom who ditches his bride to howl with the pack, a nobleman cursed by a scorned woman, and even the Devil himself pulling up in a Rolls-Royce like it’s Pimp My Ride: Hell Edition. Every tale is meant to symbolize the dangers of lust, men, and growing up, but mostly they symbolize how Angela Carter and Neil Jordan really wanted to get tenure in a literature department instead of making a horror film.
Acting: Angela Lansbury Deserved Better
Angela Lansbury gives it her all, trying to deliver lines about curses and werewolves with the same gravitas she once gave to Broadway numbers. Watching her is both inspiring and depressing: inspiring because she’s such a professional, depressing because she’s trapped in a movie that looks like Sesame Street took a very wrong turn.
Sarah Patterson, in her debut role, spends most of the film staring wide-eyed at wolves, men, and men who are wolves, while looking like she’s not sure whether to scream or ask where craft services is. Micha Bergese plays the Huntsman, a character with eyebrows so thick they should have been billed separately. His transformation scene is one of the film’s highlights, though “highlight” here means “grotesque enough to keep you from eating spaghetti for a month.”
David Warner is here too, playing Rosaleen’s father, though you could replace him with a wax statue and the difference would be negligible.
Special Effects: Snouts Out, Brains Off
Ah yes, the infamous transformation scenes. Practical effects in horror can be brilliant—just ask Rick Baker. Here, though, they’re less “terrifying” and more “what if a muppet melted in a sauna?” Faces bulge, snouts sprout, and hair explodes everywhere like a clogged drain backing up in real time. It’s gross, sure, but not scary. The movie treats these grotesque FX showcases like high art, holding on each transformation so long you start wondering if the editor fell asleep at the reel.
Wolves are everywhere in the film, but rarely convincing. Sometimes they’re real animals that look confused by the lighting equipment; other times they’re rubber puppets that wouldn’t scare a toddler at a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party.
Eroticism or Just Hairy Foreplay?
The Company of Wolves is often described as an “erotic fantasy.” Let me clarify: there is nothing erotic about a man ripping his face off to reveal a dog underneath. Unless you’ve got very specific kinks, this is about as sexy as watching a taxidermist at work.
The film tries to weave in themes of female desire and sexual awakening, but it does so with all the subtlety of a health class slideshow. Rosaleen’s “temptation” by the huntsman feels less like seduction and more like an after-school special about the dangers of hairy strangers. The whole thing plays like Little Red Riding Hood directed by a grad student who just discovered Freud and wants everyone to know about it.
Pacing: A Wolf in Sheep’s Yawning
This is a 95-minute movie that feels like three hours. Scenes drag endlessly as characters drone moralistic fairy tales at each other, while the camera lingers on set pieces like it’s admiring its own wallpaper. The anthology-within-a-dream-within-a-story structure is supposed to be poetic, but mostly it’s confusing. By the third embedded tale, you stop caring and start checking your watch, praying a real wolf will show up and put everyone out of their misery.
The Devil in the Details
One embedded story features Terence Stamp as the Devil, arriving in a Rolls-Royce chauffeured by a blonde bombshell. He offers a young man a potion that makes him sprout chest hair like a chia pet. It’s meant to be surreal, but it feels more like Stamp wandered in from another movie and nobody had the courage to tell him to leave.
And let’s not forget the symbolic wolves bursting into Rosaleen’s bedroom in the modern-day frame story, smashing her dolls. Is it a metaphor for puberty? For desire? For bad set design? Hard to say. All I know is, the wolves looked more embarrassed than threatening.
Themes: The Forest for the Trees
To give credit where it’s due, the film tries. It’s not content being a simple werewolf slasher; it wants to be a feminist fairy tale about desire, danger, and the blurred lines between woman and wolf. Admirable goal. Unfortunately, execution matters, and here the execution is as sloppy as a werewolf eating spaghetti.
Instead of resonant storytelling, we get a muddle of metaphors: wolves as men, men as wolves, women as wolves, wolves as wolves. The result isn’t thought-provoking—it’s exhausting. By the end, you don’t feel enlightened about gender politics or fairy tales; you feel like you’ve been lectured by a professor who thinks growling counts as pedagogy.
Legacy: Pretension in Sheep’s Clothing
Some critics defend The Company of Wolves as a “lost classic,” praising its atmosphere and ambition. Translation: they’re too polite to admit it’s boring. It’s the kind of movie film students pretend to like because it makes them look smart, while secretly they’d rather be watching An American Werewolf in London.
The movie’s legacy is basically this: Angela Lansbury had a bad day, Neil Jordan cut his teeth before making actual good films, and Angela Carter’s brilliant writing was mangled by the transition to screen. It’s remembered not for being good, but for being weird—and not even the fun kind of weird, like Xtro, but the tedious kind.
Final Verdict: Howl for Help
The Company of Wolves is a movie that confuses symbolism with storytelling, gore with horror, and fairy tales with Ambien. It’s not scary, it’s not sexy, and it’s not even particularly coherent. What it is is a reminder that sometimes the scariest thing in cinema isn’t the monster on screen—it’s the prospect of sitting through the entire runtime.
Grade: D
A bedtime story so dull it’ll put you to sleep long before the wolves come knocking.
