David Denby

He braves the rancid atmosphere around police headquarters and also at his newspaper, the Yorkshire Post, whose editor colludes with Dawson.

Hunter has already been stymied in his attempt to wipe out corruption.

But Garland has also been bought off by Dawson (she’s his mistress), and the wonderful Hall makes her soulfully masochistic—an intelligent but lost woman trapped in a life gone wrong.

Garland wants to be saved, but Dunford, a likably ambitious and libidinous descendant of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, is too reckless to be effective.

Many of the women are frightened or grieving, many of the men vaguely or openly guilty, even those who haven’t done anything, whose only crime is being fallible or knowing things that trouble them.

As in any mystery, we’re eager for the truth, and “Red Riding” finally delivers: inexplicable acts and cryptic conversations, baffling at first, are recapitulated, interpreted, and resolved; characters who hover meekly in the background of the first film grow in importance later in the series, sometimes by means of flashback or moments from the past opened up and made clear.

Most of the trilogy is about the wavering attempts to get at the truth of botched police investigations—ineptitudes that the novels and the movie turn into an interlocking system of corruption.

Grisoni retained Peace’s noir fatalism, his colloquial, bitter pungency—the gibes and roughhousing of male camaraderie and rivalry—and he filled out the social background.

As in any mystery, we’re eager for the truth, and “Red Riding” finally delivers: inexplicable acts and cryptic conversations, baffling at first, are recapitulated, interpreted, and resolved; characters who hover meekly in the background of the first film grow in importance later in the series, sometimes by means of flashback or moments from the past opened up and made clear.

These defiantly jocular words are spoken by a policeman as he throws a young reporter out the back of a van.

Grisoni retained Peace’s noir fatalism, his colloquial, bitter pungency—the gibes and roughhousing of male camaraderie and rivalry—and he filled out the social background.

Forgoing digital effects, or any presence of the supernatural, “The Red Riding Trilogy” nevertheless achieves a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children’s story.

A few scenes in each episode—the repeated use of swans’ wings as a portent, some fancy camerawork—border on the pretentious, but the dark power and the flowing organization of the material pull you into the narrative, which moves forward and backward in a single skein of visionary filmmaking.

Again and again, he runs into the obscurantist rancor of a crooked officer named Bob Craven, played by the eerily intense Sean Harris, who literally goes nose to nose with Paddy Considine’s Hunter, pushing him back physically with his face.

Grisoni retained Peace’s noir fatalism, his colloquial, bitter pungency—the gibes and roughhousing of male camaraderie and rivalry—and he filled out the social background.

David Peace has written that “crime is brutal, harrowing and devastating for everyone involved,” and this certainly comes through in the adaptation.

He is joined in the fight for clarity by a shabby lawyer, John Piggott (Mark Addy), a stout and morose failure who is stricken by his own family connection to the Yorkshire violence.

The hustler, B.J. (Robert Sheehan), who witnessed some of the crimes, also floats in and out of all three episodes, a softly lyrical insinuation, too scared to tell more than a little of what he knows.

Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is a more experienced and disciplined figure than Eddie Dunford, and the director of this episode, James Marsh (“Man on Wire”), in keeping with Hunter’s cool, has a more settled and purposefully matter-of-fact style.

The North in the policeman’s boast is West Yorkshire—the city of Leeds, mostly, but also featureless pale-green moors and, among them, small, rubbly towns with dead-looking brown houses.