"Riddle of Fire" is like a modern Ruth Manning-Sanders fairy tale

Last night, Ashar and I watched Riddle of Fire, a quirky and utterly delightful 2023 film written and directed by Weston Razooli. It's hard to describe or shoehorn into a genre, and I strongly suggest that you don't watch the trailer before seeking it out for a viewing. The trailer gives away too many of the plot's twists and fun moments. 

The best way I can describe Riddle of Fire is that it's as if you took the structure and offbeat logic of a Ruth Manning-Sanders fairy tale and applied it to a 2020s children's movie made to look like something filmed in the 1970s or early 1980s. There's a group of plucky children, a quest for a necessary item, obstacles, villains, magic, side quests, plot twists and loads of wry humor. The "logic" of the film, such that it is, could be described as the tale you'd hear if you asked a long-winded, sugar-fueled 10-year-old to spin a harrowing adventure involving a group of kids battling the world of comically mean-spirited adults.

I love how Austin Shinn described it on Bluesky in early May: "I love trying to explain Riddle of Fire. It’s a 70s/80s neogrindhouse movie except it’s a kids movie and it’s trying to evoke those bizarre indie films that would blow through small towns and play matinees and make zero sense and feel like a kid wrote them. It’s amazing"

One reviewer on IMDb.com hit the nail on the head, too, in stating that movie reminded them of "the films produced in the UK by the Children's Film Foundation." Yes! That struck a chord with me. There's DNA from 1976's The Man from Nowhere in this movie, even if Razooli has never seen that.

But the movie Riddle of Fire most reminded of — and this is extremely specific to a Gen X kid who watched the same half-dozen films over and over on cable in the early 1980s — is The Little Dragons. That 1980 movie (crazily enough, one of the first directorial efforts of Curtis Hanson) features a pair of karate-student brothers who are out of their element when they go camping with their grandfather, but suddenly find themselves in an adventure as they try to rescue a girl from a group of bumbling backwoods villains. It would probably make me wince today, and it only has a 4.3 rating on IMDb, but the overall vibe is similar to the retro feel Riddle of Fire achieves with great success. It's a movie that's lived in a tiny cubbyhole in my brain for decades. ("Souffle" is a good alternative cuss word, according to actor Charles Lane.)

Now, go watch Riddle of Fire.