David Peace’s “Red Riding” books, drawing on the real-life “Yorkshire Ripper” cases, are a marvel of surrealism and despair, finding language both vernacular and incantatory to capture the failed attempts of investigators and journalists to solve brutal serial killings in Leeds, Yorkshire, across two decades. The quartet of novels is pared to a trilogy, rich, compelling noir movies that were produced for British television: “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974″ (directed by Julian Jarrold, “Kinky Boots,” shooting in Super 16; “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980″ (James Marsh, “Man on Wire,” shooting in 35mm widescreen); “In the Year of Our Lord 1983″ (Anadd Tucker, “Shopgirl,” shooting with the Red One camera). The visual style in all three is as dark as the crimes on show, unafraid of the possibility of the perfume of pretension and the funk of sadism: think “Se3en” instead of “Se7en.” “1974″ may be the most successful, following Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, “Boy A”), a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post who’s returned after time spent “down South.” (The invocation of “The North”—”The North, we do what we want”—and its ways so often would be comical if not consistently menacing.) Referring to a recently disappeared peer, Peace’s novels open, “All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,’ smiled Gilman, like this way the best day of our lives… Waiting for my first Front Page, the Byline Boy at last.” Young spunk meets cloacal immersion: confronting a local real estate entrepreneur John Dawson (Sean Bean) is the first instance of Eddie’s putting of many of a foot wrong. Prolific expert David Thomson has overreached in asserting these films as the equal of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II,” but despite their gloom, violence and despair, they’re roundly thrilling: the parochial cruelty—do the police use the crimes as cover for avenging their own enemies?—is unrelenting and the depths of viciousness can hardly be guessed. Each director finds their own style, but the unity comes from screenwriter Tony Grisoni’s proficient distillation of the material and themes. In Marsh’s “1980,” Paddy Considine may give the series’ best performance as a police investigator running an internal affairs investigation of the 1974 events.) In the best possible way, “The Red Riding Trilogy” harks back to U. S. and British thrillers of the 1970s: deeply skeptical and bold in accepting that compromise and failure are an ineffable part of the human condition, or at the very least, of the genre of thrillers pitting authority against avarice. With Rebecca Hall, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan. 105m; 96m; 104m, respectively. (Ray Pride)

“The Red Riding Trilogy” opens Friday at the Music Box, with viewing options including a Roadshow-style marathon sit. The Channel 4 website has trailers and more.

(Frygtelig lykkelig) Two childhood pals tell a nasty tale set in a Danish village near a bog with many uses. Director Henrik Ruben Genz and novelist Erling Jepsen grew up in Gram, and shot their first collaboration nearby. Three characters are based on people they knew in Gram who share their names on screen: a wife-beating drunk; his seductive, bruised spouse; and their little daughter, whose paternity is a matter of whispers. This screwed-up family makes work and life really messy for the new marshal. Sent from Copenhagen, Robert (Jakob Cedergren) misses his daughter but not his wife. His troubled past got him this posting—the last marshal’s stint seemed oddly short-lived—and he will get into more trouble. The stranger with a badge is constantly told how things are done around these parts: from saying both “hello” and “goodbye” with the same word, to hanging his towels on his clothesline. “Terribly Happy” opens with a legend about a cow that sank in the bog, only to surface a half year later and give birth to a freak calf with a cow head and a woman’s head. An outbreak of insanity struck livestock and locals. Menfolk dispatched the creature to the municipal bog: “Since then, there hasn’t been any fuss with neither cattle nor women.” Fuss-control is what locals do best. No badges needed, but three cardplayers need to fill a vacant seat at their table. This dour noir deals bitter comic pokes. Rural surreal bits include a cat with a meow sounding just like a peculiar local phrase. With Lene Maria Christensen, Kim Bodnia, Lars Brygmann, Anders Hove, ens Jørn Spottag. 102m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” a consummate genre exercise, is not—and this is for the best—another “Cape Fear.” Instead, it’s a thrill of form and function, a fully crafted exercise in visual style and classical genre legerdemain.

In some of Scorsese’s pictures of the past couple of decades, “Casino” being the example that comes quickest to mind, the effect of so much antic erudition turns claustrophobic, even out in the desert, an overlay of shimmering design and compacted footnoting of the film history that makes up the grey matter in Scorsese’s colorful brain. But even beyond its salute to myriad movies most of us would never have heard of, let alone seen, “Shutter Island”’s asylum-set story is ideal for this treatment: claustrophobia, physical and mental, is made evident in every turn, fully, gloriously, inhabiting the haunted house of the mind.

An obvious and key inspiration that Scorsese cites is Robert Wiene’s 1924 “Caligari,” so it’s useful to consider “Shutter Island” as “The Cabinet of Teddy Daniels.” It’s 1954, and Teddy is a U. S. Marshal dispatched to Ashecliffe Hospital, an asylum on a rocky island offshore from Boston, to find the identity of a missing patient among the criminally insane. Teddy’s new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), leads Teddy through an investigation that moves through the wards and across the rough island, but also its raft of ominous characters, including a trimly goateed Ben Kingsley as the hospital’s director and Max von Sydow as a German-accented doctor. The timeframe of Dennis Lehane’s novel (adapted by Laeta Kalogridis, who worked as a story editor on “Avatar” for James Cameron) means wounds from World War II are still raw, including Teddy’s memories of being one of the soldiers who liberated the Nazi’s Dachau concentration camp. It’s the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well, and their witchhunts are invoked, and there’s more mental pain as well, with the migraine-prone Teddy also stricken with bad dreams about the death of his wife (Michelle Williams). (The resonance with the modern day is in how much of Teddy’s stress rests in what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder.)

“How do you believe a crazy person?” is a key line in the dialogue, suggesting as well, how do you believe a constructed narrative, or a seemingly unstable and thus unreliable narrator, or how does a marshal get viable testimony from a world that is only comprised of the mad and their controllers. Scorsese’s always been stronger on mood and character than plot-driven storytelling, but one of the great pleasures moment-by-moment in “Shutter Island” is how the mechanics of the story work: even when you think you’ve figured out one aspect of how subjective or objective a certain scene is, there’s another little bit that’s superbly crafted that fits right into the evolving mystery.

On the ferry to the island, the visual style is already off-kilter and disorienting, with a nauseated Teddy surrounded by chains and clamps and damp-mottled walls that provide nightmarish atmosphere, already the trappings of the charnel house. The first flashes we see of memories of his wife are typical, the first of two shots showing her barelegged in a summer dress, surrounded by sunlight, an apparition, golden, chiding, reaching to kiss Teddy, arch of foot and red-enameled toes, a gentle angelic smile; the second shot cuts abruptly, a half-second or more sooner than we expect: even memory is unreliable.

Cinematographer Robert Richardson’s palette is classical, heightened, burnished, with especial attention paid to eyes, capturing the flickers of thought expressed by DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Kingsley and the rest. It’s something missing from a lot of latter-day movies, especially those originating on high-definition video: concentration paid to the sculpting of light to express space, and to allow an audience to see the performers’ eyes. (These are not stained windows to the soul.) The other actors, not listed in the opening credits, walk a tightrope in what they reveal as well, but John Carroll Lynch, as one of the wardens of the asylum who’s on hand to lead Teddy and Chuck around the island, remains perhaps the most distinctive of little-recognized American character actors, who can indicate an entire character with a nod of chin, the slightest of basso intonation.

Operatic in many senses of the word, the score is assembled from existing music by Robbie Robertson, and leans very little on pop, instead drawing on needle-drops of exquisite gloom and bedlam from modern composers like Brian Eno, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Morton Feldman and especially a haunting end-title mix of Dinah Washington’s vocal for “This Bitter Earth” mixed with Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” from the movie “Pi” (another horror-of-the-mind movie). John Adams’ orchestral “Christian Zeal and Activity,” from the 1970s, dovetails nicely, too.

Terrible things happen within dream sequences that are boldly colored and inventively eruptive as the universe of Paul Schrader’s “Mishima,” and Scorsese’s evocation of movies from the era and from the noir-and-snakepit genres, as well as the superb Robert Mitchum mystery “Out of the Past” to the atmospheric work of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, never detracts or becomes top-heavy: going for baroque, Scorsese winds up with a rococo entertainment of glistening delirium. The claustrophobia is form and function: in the end, “Shutter Island” is about the life sentence everyone’s issued, until memory goes: sentenced to life in the mind.

“Shutter Island” opens Friday.

RECOMMENDED

Noah Buschel’s “The Missing Person” was well-regarded in its 2008 Sundance premiere, but makes it to theaters only now. (Elements involving the Twin Towers may be part of the reason for the modest, delayed release.) A knottily plotted detective yarn, more film blanc than noir, it features Chicago’s own Michael Shannon as a 1940s-style detective whose unintentional specialty is finding psychological damage all around him. The twenty-first century needs definition, if not detection, and Buschel’s work is a peck of poetic longeurs and narrative crisscross. The pacing is eccentric yet foreboding, suiting the elegant unease of Shannon’s performance. He’s difficult, his character is unlikable, but you can’t tear yourself away from the simmering mood, the glowing performance. From “Bug” to “Revolutionary Road” to “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” Shannon populates a world all his own, but manages to bring the movies he’s in along, revealing something about our own as well. With Amy Ryan, Frank Wood, Linda Emond, Paul Sparks, Margaret Colin, John Ventimiglia, Yul Vazquez, Merritt Wever, Daniel Franzese. 95m. (Ray Pride)