There’s no little red riding hood in the forests of present day Oregon as depicted in melancholic drama To Kill a Wolf. There is instead a blue woollen hat and a purple jacket, and that’s all that’s kept Dani (Brown) from freezing to death when a lone woodsman (Martin) finds her in the snow. There are wolves, though, and the woodsman’s being paid by cattle ranchers to kill them, but he’s got mercy running through his veins. That’s why he springs the traps set on his land, and that mercy is why he takes in this runaway, and it’s the reason he tries to help her navigate whatever broken life brought her to him.
The debut feature from writer/director Kelsey Taylor draws the loosest of inspirations from the classic middle European fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood, taking the shape and the archetypes and revising it for a modern rather than timeless tale. However, the focus is less on the familiar figure of the wolf – heck, Grandma’s dead before Dani gets to her house. That’s part of why Dani is running away, leaving her bitter aunt (Doubleday) and handsy uncle (Esper) who have become her guardians after her mother and grandmother both depart her life.
As the twice-orphaned Dani, Brown is inevitably quiet and restrained, her distance from the world a barrier of scarcely contained sadness and bruised innocence. It’s a depiction of despair that works because Brown realizes how much she must fold Dani in on herself. Moreover, it succeeds because she is counterbalanced by a sterling performance from Martin as the unnamed woodsman. A veteran character actor best known for his season 1 turn in Billions as Butch “the Pouch” Probert, Martin’s wild-haired depiction of a man driven by guilt and drawn to isolation is made of silences and callused hands, his occasional comments either brusque or tinted with the strange poetry of someone who had been alone too much. He can communicate more with a snort than a word, and Martin’s ability to create space for Brown to unfurl Dani’s trauma is core to the delicate insights of their story.
Why Little Red Riding Hood has become the most adapted fairy tale should probably be discussed as much as any of the individual adaptations. In some ways To Kill a Wolf almost feels like a riposte to arguably its greatest and most important film cinematic reconceptualization, The Company of Wolves. In Neil Jordan’s seminal adaptation of Angela Carter’s anthology, The Bloody Chamber, the heroine must find the animal within. In To Kill a Wolf, sexuality is to be neither embraced nor repressed, but a part of adulthood for good or ill. Esper and Brown share some of the most pivotal scenes as he chillingly and charmingly manipulates her into an inappropriate relationship. The forest setting for the woodsman’s home is revealed as a misdirect, as it’s really the suburbs where the predators lurk.
In contrast, the bond between the woodsman and Dani is what an uncle and niece should be – there’s a degree of wish fulfillment when Taylor wisely desexualizes their relationship, instead concentrating on their unspoken sense of connection, and the woodsman’s ability to see that there’s something off in Dani’s world beyond standard teen angst. What Taylor illustrates in this version of Little Red Riding Hood is a sensitive portrait of guilt, of the difference between people who simply want to bury it and those that are consumed by it. Her sympathy for those caught in its warm, familiar pain is what fills To Kill a Wolf with life.
