TRIBECA 2022 | MOVIE REVIEW: "A Wounded Fawn" Reigns Fury at Tribeca

8/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars

Prolific producer-turned-director Travis Stevens is tearing through horror sub-genres at a ferocious pace. Hot on the heels of his haunted house film, Girl on the Third Floor (2019), and his take on vampires with Jakob’s Wife (2021), he arrives at Tribeca in 2022 with a new Shudder Original film, A Wounded Fawn, this time trying his hand at a cat-and-mouse thriller with supernatural flourishes.

This new offering also lands even closer to the release of Mimi Cave’s recent Sundance smash, Fresh (2022). I mention this because anyone familiar with the cannibal comedy-thriller is bound to experience a degree of déjà vu when looking into A Wounded Fawn. Fawn concerns Meredith (Sarah Lind), a museum curator-turned-terminally horny dating scene entrant who embarks on a weekend escape with the handsome Bruce (Josh Ruben) to an ostentatious cabin in the woods where, of course, she falls prey to his machinations. Thankfully, we’re only scratching the surface with this description, as Stevens has taken this premise and really run with it, turning the female revenge flick into a psycho-supernatural-mythological phantasmagoria.

In the opening scene—a sort of prologue—we are schooled on a sculpture entitled The Wrath of the Erinys, which renders in what looks like jade a group of vengeful female deities reigning their wrath down upon a cowering male figure. This, along with a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau of similar subject matter, connects us with Meredith, but also establishes a sort of motif that Stevens will giddily explode, like a too-high college student putting a devilish spin on his art history thesis paper. For all we know, this may have been how A Wounded Fawn first began to take form.

But even if it is a stoner’s interpretation of feminist fury in made-up realms, it is certainly inventive, certainly distinct in its visual presentation. Shot on 16mm, or a damn good digital reproduction of, Fawn makes immediate its reverence for grindhouse psych-horrors of the 60s and 70s. Colours come at you in vivid, textural splashes; the whole frame seems to skitter and hum. Fawn is a story set in the modern day—there are smart phones—but the use of 16mm works to displace you and offset your expectations. Not much is nuanced here, but that’s kind of the point: this is a horror film painted in broad, expressionistic strokes—a good ol’ fashioned freak-out.

Giving it his all in the acting department is Josh Ruben, and while our lead, Lind, is certainly admirable as well, her performance is inevitably abstracted as a result of the psychedelic plot. When the film enters its final third, the chaos-driven, gore-filled, and hallucinatory aspects kick into high gear, and while this does assure the film is consistently thrilling on the visual front, it does bring out shortcomings within the script. Some of the havoc feels redundant of the same themes, for instance, while certain sequences come off as just plain repetitive. And where the shock of the set pieces becomes more intense, the shot composition falters and becomes sloppy as a result.

A Wounded Fawn will be welcomed on its mother streaming platform, undoubtedly, and embraced by fans reverential of the past but eager to look for new meat on the horror market, but where it will land with critics and common audiences will be within a middle ground. Stevens has an undeniable vision for his film—one that references horror films of bygones eras, modern gender politics, and ancient Greek art studies—but he must have been too smitten with this vision in its infancy, because how it exactly develops is hard to say. This is why his final product is unable to gel in a way that feels wholly satisfying.

Still, Stevens’ A Wounded Fawn should be commended for accomplishing a lot with its micro budget. Practical gore effects, makeup, costumes, and lighting are all pushed in dizzyingly fearsome directions, while the electro-acoustic score by Vaaal is suitably unhinged. I wish the midnight movie circuit was as alive today as it was back in the 70s, as this surely would have been a film to gobsmack legions of unsuspecting audiences. Since it’s not, long live the “Midnight” movie sections at our favourite festivals!