A Wounded Fawn

By: Maggie Stankiewicz

A Wounded Fawn is director Travis Stevens’ third and most effective feature film, following the underwhelming Girl on the Third Floor and the stylish, fun vampire flick Jakob’s Wife. The movie is a meditation on the horrors of modern dating (a popular theme in recent horror movies) providing viewers with a visually splendid, uniquely packaged spin on the widely held opinion that dating simply sucks. This isn’t the only significant plotline of A Wounded Fawn, though, which blends the real-life horrors of a serial killer at large and the revenge-fueled, paranormal specters that haunt him during his continued exploits. All of this is to say that A Wounded Fawn has big ideas, takes bigger swings and pulls it off thanks to a distinct directorial vision, stellar performances and well-rounded production. 

Meredith (Sarah Lind) is an abuse survivor and successful museum curator who has built up the courage and trust to embark on a romantic getaway with Bruce (Josh Ruben). Bruce is everything Meredith needs in a romantic partner. He’s handsome, he’s charming and best of all – completely disarming. Unfortunately, Bruce is only these things to Meredith, as audiences are made privy to Bruce’s deadly recreational activities early on. This creates a unique sense of tension and empathy for Meredith with the audience. Meredith is more compelling because we know what she’ll inevitably find out the hard way – that Bruce is a serial killer who, you guessed it, targets women. 

The secret isn’t kept for too long though. Early on in their romantic escape Meredith sees visions of Bruce’s victims. She writes these off as hallucinations, self-sabotaging byproducts of a woman who needs to learn how to trust again. Sarah Lind navigates these murky waters and character decisions with ease, deftly balancing the emotional weight of Meredith’s circumstances with the surreal visions and mythological visitations peppered in throughout the narrative. It’s not enough for A Wounded Fawn to tackle domestic abuse, gender and power dynamics and the weak conscience of a serial killer. It also had to throw in Greek Goddesses, vengeful ghosts and surrealist imagery bound to disorient and excite viewers. 

Director Stevens employs a lot of his old tricks in A Wounded Fawn, as this is what feels like his third (and most successful) attempt at interrogating gender dynamics. In his previous work it often felt as though Stevens was trying to say something positive about women – but his message was often buried beneath conflicting visuals and narrative foibles. After directing three films that are seemingly about women, it’s always interesting to see Stevens revert to centering his stories around the men in their orbit. 

A Wounded Fawn minorly subverts this expectation by focusing on Meredith for about half of the film before flipping the script and focusing it on Bruce. The story transitions from one about Meredith’s growth and survival to a story about Bruce as he struggles to reconcile with the ghosts of the women he’s killed. Given the tone and the execution of this film, this narrative focus feels more intentional than his past attempts. 

Much of the success of this choice is also owed to internet darling Josh Ruben, who established himself as the quirky and seemingly nice guy in Shudder’s Scare Me. Ruben is magnetic when he’s on the screen, and instantly likable. His casting is critical to the believability of Bruce and Sarah’s relationship and ensures that the audience won’t tune out when his problems become the central conflict of the film. When the Furies finally come for Bruce, Ruben turns his performance up to eleven and delivers a deliciously mad performance, giving Nicholas Cage at his most unhinged a run for his money. The weaponization of the “nice guy” is becoming a popular trope in recent films, but it’s nice to see it done in such different ways. 

A Wounded Fawn is a good movie, plain and simple. The sound design, the set design, special effects and costuming departments all had their work cut out for them – and delivered in spades. This is a wildly, visually and texturally rich film with appeal beyond the horror genre – as it’s weird enough and fun enough to capture audiences looking for something outside the generic, modular fare they’d find on Netflix or other more mainstream streaming services.