Director: Kelsey Taylor
Writer: Kelsey Taylor
Stars: Maddison Brown, Ivan Martin, Kaitlin Doubleday
Synopsis: In a modern re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood, a social pariah discovers a teenage runaway in the Oregon Wilderness and does his best to help her find a way home – a troubling exploration of trauma and redemption.
There’s something about the tale of Red Riding Hood and its deep-seated roots in the lore. The Brothers Grimm kingdom of dark fairytales has always had its fans and inquisitive searchers, especially in the film world. Many have tried multiple times to interpret it differently, especially concerning the darker elements connected to these cautionary childhood tales.
Credit: To Kill A Wolf (2024)
The latest attempt, written and directed by Kelsey Taylor, To Kill A Wolf tells the story of a mysterious woodsman (Ivan Martin), infatuated not just with music, but with sound -shown through the disparity between his modest living and his self-assembled, high-tech sound gear and systems- who relies on music to kill his infinite loneliness. He has another hobby, he likes to unhook wolf traps in the woods, he saves wolves, rather than kills them -a bold contrast to the film’s title- and during one of his elaborate wolf-saving missions, he finds an unconscious Dani (Maddison Brown). After he saves her, their journey begins.
Dani’s journey as the Red Riding Hood is one of being let down by one adult after the other. Unlike the woodsman, whose mystery in life is easily revoked by his openness about his emotional expression, Dani is a closed book. It’s not easy to decipher how she’s feeling amid the chaos. Taylor does an excellent job of shifting POVs and dismantling tropes. If there is mystery about the woodsman’s origin and past, Dani’s inner world is a vault. Her heart is locked, not to be unearthed any time soon. Their characters couldn’t be more different, but their unity stems from a single goal: running away from pain.
Dani’s harrowing silence unfolds into scenes from her scary reality, and the hints at her sexual abuse surface along with the manipulation of her “wolf,” rationalizing her into silence, putting her on mute. This leaves the viewers in a state of discomfort, relief, and catharsis. The truth is out, but what does a girl like her do about it? And is there anything to do about such prickly situations where one person is defenseless, young, and scared and the other…a wolf!
Credit: To Kill A Wolf (2024)
I am surprised by Taylor’s -a director unfortunately I have not been familiar with- immaculate attention to detail. Her characters don’t foolishly exist in a vacuum but have their own inner worlds, shown in glimpses from one scene to the next. She brilliantly practices world-building for her characters like a pro, handling the tonal shifts and the uncomfortable character dynamics with a mastery that paves the way for better control of her craft in upcoming movies.
Adam Lee’s cinematography highly complements her careful direction, creating a grainy, gloomy, world that manipulates the idea of a wolf. An animal born to hunt or a sexual predator, carefully manipulating all those around him to appear as villains, while he’s the one who hides his claws in plain sight. The wolf -or the Canis lupus- is innocent in this tale, hunted down by greedy humans, while the wolf (as the director dedicates one of her chapters to him) in his human form is the predator, the real one guilty of hurting Dani; the Red Riding Hood of our tale.
But what is the wolf really? And why do we have to kill it? Is it metaphorical -the wolf of our past, haunting us, running after us in the dark trail at night- or actually approaching the predator in the dark? The film doesn’t necessarily specify those symbols with clarity. A wolf is a wolf. And a grandma is a grandma, but what if a symbol is complicit in playing the role of another. Then who is to say the fairytale doesn’t play by the rules?
Credit: To Kill A Wolf (2024)
To Kill A Wolf makes the alluring woods, lonely, dark, and deep as they are, a place for refuge and shelter, but also an incubator for where the sleeping dogs lie. Secrets are buried alongside their perpetrators, and the woods with their giant trees are witnesses to all the traumas buried beneath the surface. Taylor’s film makes one car ride a woodsman makes to transport Red Riding Hood into a journey inside the forest of the self.
