Tale of Tales review: Old stories given an unsettlingly delicious horror twist

Angela Carter wasn't the first person to retool traditional fairy tales for a modern, post-Freudian audience, but since The Bloody Chamber emerged in 1979, all semi-serious treatments of such stories seem burdened by her influence. No cigar is just a cigar.

Matteo Garrone's fabulous (in all senses of the word) treatment of three yarns from Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone – a key 17th-century text – does place some distance between itself and Carter. There is no sense of reinvention here. There are few hints that the stories are being moulded to current concerns.

Yet Tale of Tales feels abundantly fresh throughout. That is because, unlike too many treatments of such tales, Garrone is prepared to embrace the ancient malevolence and delight in another century's naked cruelty.

Are these morality tales? Well, each revolves around a character making bad decisions in pursuit of very human desires. Deals are made with witches and necromancers that result in rewards fatally tainted by horrible compromise. (We are reminded how WW Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw remains firmly in the tradition.)

But the innocent don’t have much fun either. A princess is handed to an ogre who treats her as a sex slave. One elderly sister prospers by magic; the other is propelled towards bloody catastrophe. There is a lesson here rather than a moral. Even if we had access to magic, life would still be nasty, brutish and short.

One story features Salma Hayek and John C Reilly as a king and queen who long desperately and unsuccessfully for a child. One night a sorcerer arrives with an unlikely suggestion. If the queen eats the heart of a sub-aquatic dragon – cooked by a virgin, of course – then she will hastily become pregnant.

There is a price: somebody, somewhere will die. Sure enough, the poor king kicks the bucket, but Queen Salma cares only for her new son. Other strangeness is afoot. The virgin gives birth to a child who seems the twin of the young prince.

More doom
In what we take to be an adjacent realm, King Toby Jones lives unhealthily with his beautiful daughter (Bebe Cave). Such is his solipsistic absorption that, when the princess is singing for him, he can only concentrate on the flea that leaps from one kingly finger to the other. The animal eventually becomes a pet that he feeds into something the size of a modest haystack. The beast's death sends the king towards a crisis that ultimately dooms his daughter to a life of violent servitude.

The third story features Vincent Cassel as a lusty royal who, hearing a sweet song sweetly sung, falls remotely in love with the singer (Hayley Carmichael). It transpires she is a traditional crone who, as is the way in such things, lives a remote life with an equally haggard sister (Shirley Henderson). Various trickery allows the old woman to fool the prince for a while. But we know that everybody is likely to suffer in the end.

At the Tale of Tales premiere at Cannes, critics of a certain age enjoyed comparing the film to the notoriously creepy East German TV series The Singing Ringing Tree that was broadcast to unnerved British children in the 1970s. Nothing here compares to the eerily crummy special effects and unfamiliar dubbing that unintentionally made that show so disturbingly memorable.

Indeed, the lavishness of Garrone’s production softens the horror to soothing effect. Alexandre Desplat’s score is as plush and melodic as we expect from that composer. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, a collaborator with David Cronenberg and Ken Russell, knows how to make the horrible unsettlingly delicious.

One might argue that the medieval nihilism leaves the viewer in a lonely place. But the sheer relish with which the film devours its horrors is compelling in itself. Garrone, who made the gangster flick Gomorrah and the morality tale Reality, emerges, in his first English-language feature, as a director of rare versatility. Quite something.