Trigger Warning: The narrative of To Kill a Wolf grapples with difficult topics involving sexual abuse.
The two earliest written versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story come from author Charles Perrault (1697) and from The Brothers Grimm (1800s), each providing a moral lesson regarding being aware of dangers “in the forest,” the metaphor being a warning for lost innocence by men who prey on women. (It shouldn’t be passed over, by the way, that these stories are always about girls and women needing protection and not telling men to avoid being shitbags, but I digress.) In her modern adaptation, writer/director Kelsey Taylor (Alone in Tombstone) reframes the warning to address a different kind of wolf within the context of statistical accuracy — someone is more likely to be violated by someone they know than a stranger, the intimacy of familiarity becoming a trap of a different sort. Though Taylor’s approach isn’t graphic in the slightest, it is no less full of dread and horror as time moves forward and backward while it unfurls a mystery of a most upsetting trauma and profound deception.
Living in isolation in the woods of Oregon, The Woodsman (Ivan Martin) spends much of his free time wandering his extensive wooded property with a metal detector. On one such excursion, he finds an unconscious girl lying on the forest floor, surrounded by snow and brush. He brings the girl to his home, gives her a place to rest and recover, and tries to get her back home. Worried that placing her on a bus isn’t enough, he takes it upon himself to take the girl, Dani (Maddison Brown), to his grandmother’s home. What he doesn’t realize is that by delivering her, he is, himself, sending her right back into the wolf’s den.
Maddison Brown as Dani in TO KILL A WOLF. Photo courtesy of Santa Barbara Film Festival.
Everything comes down to trust. What you do, where you go, trust is woven into the fabric of every choice and action. Not just trust in others, but in yourself, as well. If you surround yourself with people who uplift you, then you’re more likely to uplift yourself. Come up in a space mired in distrust, then you’re less likely to trust yourself. Within Wolf, trust is a massive part of the underpinning of the narrative. It plays out within the characters, such as The Woodsman coming into to town only for supplies, but otherwise existing as a specter in the woods on the hunt for something. It plays out with the setting, a mix of lush green and icy snow, indicating a possible between-season period where one tip of the weather scale could either bring out woodland creatures and new buds for blooming or a shelf of snow that would bury it all. It plays out within Adam Lee’s (High Heat; Alone in Tombstone) cinematography which brings out the natural tones and colors of the environment, the clothes, and characters so that fairytales are the furthest thing from the mind. In particular, Lee and Taylor’s choice to use a 1:55 viewing aspect ratio creates the simultaneous sensations of being closed in horizontally and given enormous space vertically. When used in concert with, for example, an image of The Woodsman walking along the forest floor in close-up, we get the full measure of Martin’s (Madeline’s Madeline) frequently quiet and magnetic performance, while being given the visual suggestion that for all the space he’s in, he’s quite confined. Conversely, a shot of Dani moving through the woods in a wider shot makes the character feel tiny and vulnerable (aided by Brown’s (Strangerland) outward conveyance of Dani’s internal turmoil) against the wide expanse of the seemingly endless wood, even if maneuvering through a clearing. The visual language pushes the audience to trust in what they see as much as what they feel, even when the two may appear even slightly in opposition. A favorite moment being in the early introduction portion of the first chapter of the film, titled “The Woodsman,” wherein we see The Woodsman preparing to go into the woods and the hairstyle given to Martin, especially as it looks from behind him, suggests two ears atop his skull. We’re told the subtitle is “The Woodsman.” We observe a man living in the woods. And we understand him to be someone who possesses a secret of his own. Are we to trust him or is he the wolf is sheep’s clothing waiting for an opportunity to strike vulnerable Dani? Similarly, the film opens with Dani running through the woods before cutting to The Woodsman, Brown, a suitable screen partner for Martin, conveying a great deal through her physical performance, and much of the way Dani reacts and responds could be representative of someone seeking to spring a trap. It isn’t until certain confessions are made and time leaps backward that the audience has a proper sense of the players, but, by then, the narrative has laid such a tender trap that, at the very least, we, the audience, are hooked.
When we talk about trust, this includes the production itself. This is neither Taylor’s first time directing nor her first time writing, but is the first full feature where she’s prominently leading the production. She’s directed several shorts (Alien: Specimen (2019) and Alone in Tombstone (2020) among them), as well as served as either second unit or assistant director on other projects, such as High Heat (2022), which featured Wolf cast members Martin and Kaitlin Doubleday (also of Waiting…). As mentioned, even her cinematography is handled by someone (Lee) with whom she has a pre-established working relationship. By surrounding herself with talent in front of and behind the camera, Taylor’s more able to focus on bringing her vision to life. Impressively, To Kill a Wolf is a heck of a calling card. Even when so much of the film involves the camera holding on someone being pensive, either stationary or moving, there’s never a sense of slowed momentum from the instant we see Dani running in the woods to the closing credits. Rather, the narrative is propulsive because so many are potentially not who they appear to be and that makes the mystery of who to trust palatable. It also means that with each chapter, as more information is revealed and we start to creep toward the truth, the tension doesn’t let up so much as get focused and directed. Taylor makes it quite clear that Wolf is a re-imagining rather than an adaptation of Riding Hood, which allows the creative to toy with the material. In this case, that means shifting the violence away from metaphor as it relates to men in general and toward a specific sort of man with a specific relationship to “Little Red.”
It’s here that Wolf bares its teeth and its disquiet leaps from the screen and into the pits of one’s stomach. All through the film, Taylor presents characters who could be the representation of one fairytale figure or another, giving them environmental placement or physical/behavioral traits that make one seem like damsel, hero, or threat; however, when the truth becomes known and the underpinnings rise to the surface, the horror of Wolf devastates. What some in the audience may struggle with is that Taylor doesn’t push, she allows the performances of her talented and small cast to fill in blanks. The film itself doesn’t preach or coddle, but it also doesn’t make a meal of things. What this means (and I’m trying to stay abstract so as to reduce spoilers) is that the issue that caused Dani to run so far and so fast through the woods is something she can’t outrun, and the script doesn’t make a point to use the truth any more than its needs to, preferring instead to use it to highlight how trust is a fragile thing, easily broken by those who would gladly misuse and abuse it for their own gain. In a narrative world wherein anyone can be a wolf and anyone can be a damsel, so, too, can anyone be a hero, and each takes on different shapes since the wolf has the same sizes of eyes, mouth, and teeth as the others, no longer begging the telltale reaction of “my, what big ears you have …”
If you or someone you know may been in need of assistance as it relates to sexual violence, RAINN offers many resources and ways to access help.
Screening during Santa Barbara Film Festival 2025.
In select theaters beginning August 1st, 2025.
For more information, head to the official To Kill a Wolf website.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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