Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Travis Stevens
Starring: Josh Ruben, Sarah Lind, Malin Barr, Katie Kuang, Laksmi Hedemark
Actor Josh Ruben made his feature debut as writer/director
with the recent
Scare Me, a post #MeToo horror movie in which he cast himself as an
over-confident man who gets his comeuppance at the hands of a woman
during a stay at a remote cabin. It's easy then to see why he agreed
to star in director Travis Stevens' A Wounded Fawn, as here he's once again cast as an over-confident man who gets his
comeuppance at the hands of a woman during a stay at a remote
cabin.
While Scare Me saw Ruben play a man whose biggest crime
was believing he was a more talented writer than a woman who had
published several books, here he's a fully fledged serial killer. In
the first of the film's two key nods to
Psycho, we watch a woman who we initially assume might be the movie's
heroine meet her end after allowing Ruben's Bruce into her home.
A Wounded Fawn opens in an exclusive New York auction
house where a classical Greek figurine depicting three women taking
vengeance on a man (yeah, this isn't the most subtle film of all time)
is open for bidding. The piece ends up in the hands of Bruce when he
butchers the winning bidder (Malin Barr), and is the first
thing noticed by his potential next victim, Meredith (Sarah Lind), when she arrives at his remote cabin for what should be a romantic
weekend.
A couple of clunkily written scenes told us earlier us that Meredith
has only just gotten over the abusive relationship she escaped from
three years earlier and that Bruce is the first man she's dated since
then. It's a little hard to swallow that given her past experiences,
Meredith would head off to a remote cabin with a man she barely knows.
If you can brush aside this improbability, the next 40 minutes or so
of A Wounded Fawn are filled with well sustained tension
and dread. Lind does a fine job of portraying the increasing
discomfort Meredith feels in the company of Bruce, who seems to be
trying a little too hard to come off as a nice guy. Various sounds and
visions of a woman on Bruce's porch freak Meredith out even further,
but Bruce dismisses these incidents as products of her imagination as
she tries to convince him to take her back to the city.
Midway through the film there's a twist that sees
A Wounded Fawn morph into a very different film. After
centring the first half on Meredith and effectively making us root for
her to get the hell away from Bruce, Stevens attempts to pull off
another move from the Psycho playbook by subsequently
positing Bruce as the central figure. It simply doesn't work because
while Norman Bates may have been guilty of a crime as bad as those of
Bruce, Hitchcock's masterful direction and Anthony Perkins'
performance put the viewer through something approaching Stockholm
Syndrome, making us relate to a man who has just brutally murdered a
woman. Bruce, on the other hand, is just plain unlikeable, and it's
impossible to feel any sort of empathy for him as he pleads his case
against the supernatural forces serving as judge, jury and executioner
in an impromptu trial.
It's in this period of the film that Bruce's name and his denim shirt
click as being specifically chosen – Stevens turns the second half of
his film into a play on Evil Dead II, with Bruce battling demons in and around the cabin. It's a clever
idea, and the presumably 16mm photography really adds to the effect
along with Ruben's rubber faced, Bruce Campbell-esque performance, but
it's not played for laughs and it's too silly and heavy-handed to take
seriously. After a tense first half grounded in real-life fears,
A Wounded Fawn becomes a tedious supernatural horror
desperate to hammer home a point it made far more effectively
in its earlier scenes.