In the Flesh: A Wounded Fawn

Critic’s Disclaimer: I am friendly with this film’s star and with its director. While I have given friends and acquaintances less than stellar reviews many times before, I believe in full transparency.

We begin with a bronze sculpture of the erinyes, the furies of Greek and Roman myth, tormenting a criminal. At once, director Travis Stevens establishes a firm command of the close-up, snapping from detail to detail as a packed auction house seethes over the collector’s item. Neckties. Kerchiefs. Thin lips licked by hungry tongues. The rich and their bagmen are feeding, intent on their objet d’art and blind to the fact that they are, in turn, being stalked. There’s a killer among them, the mysterious, unassuming Bruce Ernst (Josh Ruben) and his silent passenger the Red Owl (Marshall Taylor Thurman), an inhuman entity he believes drives him to murder women and steal their beautiful possessions for himself. Ruben is disarming as the killer, though not so overly smooth as to stray into the territory of the superhuman. He prickles at unforeseen questions, guilts and needles his victims, and otherwise displays a believable range of human foibles.

Opposite our killer is his intended third victim, Meredith Tanning (Sarah Lind), a reserved young art historian newly emerged from an abusive relationship. Lind plays this mix of conscious self-restraint and eagerness with tremendous facility. You can see her continually reining herself in as she tries to determine whether her friction with Bruce is the result of his rudeness or her own lingering trauma. It’s a tough balancing act, and one that gives Meredith a compelling and easily visually legible screen presence, especially in light of the film’s look, grainy and highly saturated in a delicious homage to the bloody occult slashers of the 1970s. The blood in A Wounded Fawn is that unique Bava syrup which looks more like gore than the real thing, a candy-colored paint solution which pools seamlessly and drips like running wax. With the exception of an awkwardly blocked and framed early scene featuring Meredith and her friends in a museum, the film is artfully lush, nearly every frame carefully drawn, its sets meticulous but inarguably real.

Visuals allusions to everything from Peter Greenaway to No Country for Old Men abound, cleverly incorporated into the emerging story of the furies personified as Bruce’s three victims torturing him to madness and suicide. The film’s dialog in this last stretch isn’t always up to the level of its astonishing costuming and impressive visual effects, but a few awkward lines are a small price to pay for the sight of something as astonishing as the flying geometrical shape Stevens and his crew conjure out of what looks like no more than piping and satin, or the sequence in which the masked fury Tisiphone (Lind in a double role) sits interrogating Bruce at his own dinner table, dozens of snakes slithering over her unmoving body. Bruce’s personal mythology runs up against a real one, far more dangerous and wild, and in spite of a few minor stumbles, Stevens captures that sense of awestruck abject horror with a flair and craftsmanship few others could muster.