There’s a heavy, somber pallor that hangs over To Kill a Wolf, writer/director Kelsey Taylor’s debut feature. Working with cinematographer Adam Lee, Taylor films the sprawling woods of the Pacific Northwest like a mysterious, occasionally ominous labyrinth of dense underbrush and looming, towering trees. It’s deep in this forest that we meet The Woodsman (Ivan Martin), a quiet fellow who lives alone in a small, cramped trailer nestled in the middle of these backwoods. He wanders the thicket with a metal detector searching for wolf traps, which he springs so that animals don’t stumble across them. He spends his evenings listening to records, and a brief sojourn to civilization for food and other supplies illustrates just how uncomfortable he is amongst other people. Taylor shoots these early sequences with a quiet, even tone, and it’s unclear exactly how we are supposed to respond to this curious man. To Kill a Wolf almost functions as a kind of horror movie, or at least has the aesthetic trappings of one, so it’s somewhat alarming when he stumbles across the body of a young woman, passed out alone in the forest. He drags her body back to his home on a tarp, warms her up, and offers her some food once she comes to. She is Dani (Maddison Brown), and the rest of the film will recount how exactly she wound up lost and alone in this place.
Most of the film’s press materials mention that it’s a sort of modern spin on “Little Red Riding Hood,” a mostly misleading bit of marketing copy. At most, Taylor has used the iconography of a lost child evading a predator as very loose inspiration for a much more grounded and somber tale of dealing with trauma. The film is divided into chapters, introducing The Woodsman & Dani before flashing back to show Dani’s life leading up to an unimaginable moment of sexual abuse. Taylor takes a roundabout way of revealing all this information, choosing first to spend ample time on the burgeoning (if tentative) friendship between The Woodsman and Dani. He’s broken in his own way, and thankfully, Taylor doesn’t make him another threat to Dani. She’s obviously cautious around him, but any tension that he might be dangerous is quickly dissipated. He wants her to go back to her family, as is natural, but isn’t aware that that’s exactly what she’s fleeing from. The two seem to finally seal a bond of some sort when Dani assists the man in freeing a wolf from a trap that he had missed. It’s a brief sequence, filmed under cover of night, but by working together, the pair manage to save a creature. A metaphor, perhaps, but not a forced one.
The Woodsman finally convinces Dani that she has to get home, and so she has him drive her to her grandmother’s house. But it’s empty, and the man is concerned that they’ve now broken into a house that isn’t theirs. Here, we get the start of a new chapter, and Taylor finally introduces Dani’s Aunt Jolene (Kaitlin Doubleday) and her husband, Uncle Carey (Michael Esper); Dani’s grandmother (also her legal guardian) has passed away, hence the empty house, leaving Jolene and Carey to be Dani’s caretakers until she turns 18. But there’s a lot of animosity roiling underneath the surface here; Dani’s mother is long gone, and the aunt harbors a lifetime of resentment against both her sister and now deceased mother, animosity that can’t help but color her interactions with Dani. Carey is adept at playing an aw-shucks nice guy, but he clearly can’t stand his high-strung wife. Watching him turn on the charm and insinuate himself with Dani is deeply disturbing, and while Taylor chooses not to show any graphic acts, the implications are unsettling enough.
Eventually, the narrative closes in on itself, and we wind up back at the film’s beginning, now with a clearer understanding of all that has transpired. The Woodsman’s eventual explanation of his own troubled past doesn’t muddy the waters or detract from Dani’s own story, but goes a long way toward deepening the friendship between these two people. Ultimately, To Kill a Wolf is a film about learning how to trust someone again, and if that sounds too pat, it’s a testament to Taylor’s skills that the film remains riveting throughout. On top of that, it’s simply a stunningly beautiful movie to just look at, every frame carefully composed in simple but effective framings, and Brown anchors the whole thing with a star-making performance in an extremely tricky role. To Kill a Wolf might be too “small” a film to make much noise in our current media landscape — it’s not flashy or gimmicky enough to garner mass media attention, and theaters mostly don’t exhibit films like this anymore. It’s a shame, as this is exactly the kind of movie we need more of.
DIRECTOR: Kelsey Taylor; CAST: Maddison Brown, Michael Esper, Kaitlin Doubleday, Ivan Martin; DISTRIBUTOR: All the Better; IN THEATERS: August 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
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