The movie kicks off with Little Red Riding Hood, but not the innocent girl we’ve always known. This Red is curious, smart, and way more observant than anyone around her gives her credit for. She literally stumbles into Cinderella’s life right before the iconic ball, and from that moment, things start twisting in ways you don’t expect. Cinderella isn’t just the sweet, abused girl desperate to meet her prince — she’s layered, vulnerable, and even a little manipulative in her own way. Red instantly spots this, and instead of staying quiet, she starts pulling at the threads of everyone’s stories, almost like she can’t help herself.
One of the first scenes that stuck with me was when they meet the Fairy Godmother. Usually, she’s portrayed as this kind, guiding figure, but here she feels different — more like someone with her own agenda, someone who knows more than she’s letting on. It made me realize how unsettling it is when a character you’ve always trusted suddenly feels… off. And Red notices it too, that uneasy energy, and I felt like I was seeing things through her eyes. That was the moment I knew this wasn’t going to be a comfortable retelling; it was going to mess with me.
Then comes the ball itself. Oh God, what a scene is so dripping with glamour and tension. Everyone is dressed to kill, both literally and metaphorically, and it is like you are in a room of masks, beautiful people smiling, dancing and whispering secrets behind each other. Red is visiting that space like a detective who is a guest and her eyes are flying everywhere taking note of those details that no one wants to bother noticing. My blood ran cold when the camera tracks her though, it seems almost like it would have been suspicious, too. I was keeping my breath, and was waiting till the first crack would show.
And then — the murder. That twist drops like a bomb. You know one minute it is all glittering gowns and waltzes, and the next somebody is dead. The entire mood changes and in a moment it is not a colorful fairy-tale any more, it is a crime scene. The manner in which the guests respond had me laughing and gasping simultaneously, since all of them are either overdramatic, totally clueless or trying to seem innocent too hard. And here the bit that came to me-- Red is not diffident. She bends over, as though this is what she has been waiting for. And she begins to assemble them together right in the ballroom reading faces, seeing contradictions.
I liked that the film made her the detective that we never knew we needed. She makes no display of it, she is simply insistent; she follows her instincts, and raises questions that no one else has the courage to ask. And in her we have the advantage of peeling off the layers of all these fairy-tales characters that we thought we were familiar with. The prince, to take but one instance-- he is not only charming, but vain, insecure, nearly desperate in holding his own image together. Cinderella herself, not completely naive, trapped in her own lies. The Fairy Godmother, too, who was apparently innocent, now struck with suspicion, and whose magic was now appearing more of a curse than a blessing.
The scene when Red begins to question people in an indirect manner by seemingly talking to them like she was just chatting was one of the most amusing and yet the scariest scenes to me. Her act of catching them in lies, and in a way where she contrasts the characters was so crisp and gratifying. But I also found it uncomfortable, as it reminded me of situations in real life where I have been lied to in the face, where someone represented something, and was actually another, as all. That pangs, that clumsiness of realizing that a person is not, who he claims to be — the film struck that.
The more Red dug the more perverted it became. Confidences concerning debts, betrayals, love affairs-- all at once the fairy-tale kingdom resembled a crime-infested little village with everybody having a motive. There is this one scene when Cinderella cries but not in a dramatical, glass-slipper manner, but in a rough, human manner. She comes out with admissions that pained me about her, how much of her naivete is merely survival, how she is shaping her truth to get people to support her. That hit me hard, because haven’t we all done that in some way? Played a role to survive, to get by, to be seen in a way that makes people help us instead of ignoring us? That scene made me stop laughing for a bit and just sit with the discomfort of how true it felt.
Then the movie pulled the rug out once again just when I thought I had figured out who the killer was. All evidence was pointing to the one direction, but Red had an instinct that pointed to the contrary, and I was fascinated, attempting to keep pace with her keenness, attempting to detect what she perceived which I overlooked. And when the truth eventually broke loose, when the murderer was uncovered it was not only shocking, it was chilling. It was not a great, oratorical maniacal motive but a human, vulgar, panhandling one. That’s what made it hit harder. Since the villains in fairy tales are always conspicuous ugly, jealous, wicked. But here? The villain was standing in open view smiling, blending, faking it to be good. And is that so like real life?
At the climax, when Red finally gets everything and reveals the truth, I experienced this urge of satisfaction and at the same time this weird melancholy. Since yes, justice was meted, but innocence was lost. Suddenly these tales we had always swore to magic and happily-afterwards suddenly seemed delicate, threatening, even deadly. And I understood that that was what the film was attempting to convey to us that in the most beautiful worlds, there are shadows.
It is not even the murder or the clever twists that I found more interesting but Red herself. She reminded me of this in all of us which is unwilling to believe the narrative that is given to us, which insists on digging, at the time that all other people would prefer to turn a blind eye. She is untidy, inquisitive, insistent and at times too fat but she is real. I felt like watching her that I have questioned myself several times in my own life and dug at lies until they crumbled even when someone told me to forget it.
And honestly, it made me proud — proud of that messy, stubborn part of me that doesn’t settle for surface-level truths.
So yeah, Once Upon a Crime wasn’t just a quirky murder mystery wrapped in fairy-tale glitter. It was a mirror, showing me how often we live surrounded by masks, how easy it is to hide darkness under beauty, and how much courage it takes to look deeper. It was hilarious, yes. It was wild, yes. But it was also haunting in a way I didn’t expect.
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