USA. 2022.
Crew
Director – Travis Stevens, Screenplay – Nathan Faudree & Travis Stevens, Producers – Joe Barbagallo, Laurence Gendron & Travis Stevens, Photography – Ksusha Genefeld, Music – VAAL, Visual Effects Designer/Supervisor – Peter Szewczyk, Special Effects – 13 Finger FX, Makeup Effects – Dan Martin, Production Design – Sonia Foltarz. Production Company – Snowfort Pictures/Barbhouse Productions/Genco Pictures.
Cast
Josh Ruben (Bruce Ernst), Sarah Lind (Meredith Tanner/Tisiphone), Malin Varr (Kate Horna/Alecto), Katie Kuang (Leonora/Megaera), Tanya Everett (Wendy), Laksmi Hedemark (Julia), Marshall Taylor Thurman (The Red Owl), Neal Mayer (The Auctioneer), Nikki James (The Therapist)
Plot
Art gallery assistant Meredith Tanner has a date with Bruce Ernst, unaware that he is in fact a serial killer. She joins Bruce as they head away to his cabin for the weekend. They arrive but as Bruce prepares dinner, Meredith thinks she sees things moving outside. She becomes fearful and wants to return to the city. Bruce then attacks her. However, the woods are alive with entities that seem determined to punish Bruce for his trail of crimes.
Travis Stevens is better known as a producer with medium-budget horror films like Summer’s Blood (2009), A Horrible Way to Die (2010), Little Deaths (2011), World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries (2011), The Aggression Scale (2012), The Thompsons (2012), Big Ass Spider! (2013), Cheap Thrills (2013), Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), Starry Eyes (2014), We Are Still Here (2015) and Hover (2018). Stevens made his directorial debut with Girl on the Third Floor (2019), followed by Jakob’s Wife (2021).
A Wounded Fawn falls into the same plot of a surprising number of other films that came out in 2022 – that the woods and countryside are alive with witches and Folk Horror entities that are stirring and coming back to haunt the living. In many cases, they seem to have come back to punish men for their misdeeds. Similar things play out in other films such as She Will (2021), Matriarch (2022), Men (2022) and Moloch (2022). A Wounded Fawn mixes it up slightly and has three figures from Greek Myth come to make a man pay for his sins but essentially follows these others.
Half the film plays out as a preamble. There is a prologue that takes place at an art auction as Josh Ruben, who is also a director known for Werewolves Within (2021), bids on a statuette of the three Erinyes and then turns up at Malin Varr’s residence to make a rogue bid, before killing her. We are then introduced to Sarah Lind. The rest of the first half plays out as she prepares to go a date, before her date is revealed to be with Ruben’s serial killer and they take a trip to his cabin in the woods.
The downside of this is that we never much see the attraction and connection between Josh Ruben and Sarah Lind. He is described as charming but all of the dialogue between the two of them seems filled with awkwardness or moments where his actions are intended to seem controlling. Even aside from that, the entirety of this first half is filled with scenes where Sarah Lind is spooked by doors banging open or thinking she is seeing things outside triggering the motion sensor lights, and then deciding she feels unsafe and wanting to go home. We even literally get to see red flags waving at one point. What would have made this work far more effectively is seeing everything through her eyes, not having the prologue that let us know that Josh Ruben was a killer from the outset, of being able to actually see his charms before a shock twist revealed that he was really a killer. Maybe that would have been too straightforward a way for Travis Stevens to tell the story.
On the other hand, the latter half of the film becomes simply incomprehensible. It seems to all be about Josh Ruben being chased through the woods by the three Greek Furies or Erinyes, all of whom for some reason are played by the two main women actors (Sarah Lind and Malin Varr with Katie Kuang making a third). This section wanders between psychedelia and arty pretensions, before ending with a mentally shattered Josh Ruben writhing on the ground in his underwear and covered in blood as the end credits roll.
Trailer here