A Wounded Fawn is a 2022 Surreal Horror movie directed by Travis Stevens and distributed by Shudder.
The movie follows a serial killer, Bruce Ernst, with an obsession for art and women. He brings his latest possible victim, Meredith, to a retreat in the woods for a weekend away with just the two of them, but strange things start happening.
Tropes
- Alone with the Psycho: Meredith learns that Bruce has stolen the Erinyes sculpture and likely murdered its buyer. She learns this while in Bruce's bathroom, miles from civilization.
- And Show It to You: A variation. During his talk with Tisiphone, Bruce claims that his actions are the fauly of an evil part within himself, rather than him. She asks him to show her, prompting him to touch on his head wound and pick out a fetal bird. Tisiphone claims he is fucked and disappears, and Bruce is alone in a normal room, but looks down to see not a baby bird, but a piece of his brain he picked out from the head wound left by Meredith.
- Animal Motif:
- Owls to Bruce. Like them, he is a bird of prey, per se, who kills several women to satisfy his bloodlust using a claw-like weapon. His bloodlust is represented by an owl-like figure appearing before him to ask for a kill.
- Snakes for the Erinyes. One of Meredith's friends wears a dress covered in snakes, which is fitting because Meredith and her two friends match the three female Erinyes. When one the Erinyes is talking with Bruce, more and more snakes appear around her. A snake hits the window during Bruce and Meredith's date, possibly to warn her. One of them is also able to turn a stove into a snake to attack Bruce. Tisiphone, one of the furies and the "Tormentor of Murderers" that plays a role as the front of the group and represents Meredith among Bruce's victims, is shown in the statue with a snake hair. The film's poster also depicts a snake protruding from Bruce's mouth.
- Dogs for the Erinyes. When Meredith first meets Bruce by his car, a dog charges past as if to frighten Meredith away. Later, Bruce is menaced by that same dog in the woods. Its head turns into Kate's head, inversing the dog-headed Fury.
- Asshole Victim: When Bruce offers to double Kate's buyer's investment and throw in $25,000 for herself, quite a sweetheart deal, she still demands 20% of Bruce's commission before she'll relay the offer. Her greed keeps her from overshadowing Meredith in the audience's sympathies.
- Bathos: The end, where Bruce is flailing on the ground and repeatedly slashing his own throat for several straight minutes, even through the closing credits, is played to be pathetic as well as creepy.
- The Beautiful Elite: The art auction includes periodic insert shots of the attendees' expensive and stylish fashion accessories.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Meredith's gaze lingers for no particular reason on a tarp covering some firewood. She later fashions clothes out of it.
- Bruce's grip on his fire poker tightens several times as he resists the urge to murder Meredith immediately. In the third act, he does attempt to use it as a weapon.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The story starts with Bruce participating in an auction for an important statue of the Erinyes, on which their myths are described. The Erinyes then become the Hero Antagonist of the movie as they seek to punish Bruce.
- Chekhov's Skill: Meredith is an art expert who is introduced inspecting a gallery of famous artwork depicting the Erinyes. Later, she uses that skill to identify that Bruce's sculpture of the Erinyes isn't a replica like he claims, which leads her to discover his true nature.
- Color Motif: Red. Red is one of the most pronounced colors in the photography of the movie, with very saturated reds all through the movie. Red is also a color that adorns The Owl whenever it appears for Bruce. The movie has several shots heavy in red, like a shot of Bruce cutting pomegranates, and red items, like the red front door of the house, the red flags in the road, the couple's choice of red wine, red walls, a lot of blood, and the vivisected Owl.
- Decoy Protagonist: We start the film by following Kate, but she's murdered in her second scene. The film then jumps to Meredith, a new character.
- Dies Wide Open: The camera focuses on Meredith's staring eyes, one having welled with blood. But it's subverted because she's actually not dead.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous: Bruce strips Meredith's corpse down to her red bra and panties, though it's subverted because she's revealed to still be alive.
- Empathic Environment: When Bruce tells Meredith that his parents both died when he was young, their car drives through a tunnel, covering Bruce's face in shadow and making the ambient sound go hollow, putting an additional creepy ambiance to the awkward silence that follows.
- Faking the Dead: Meredith pretends to be dead after Bruce slashes her throat.
- Feminist Fantasy: The first half of the movie depicts a young woman, who survived an abusive relationship, now surviving an attempt on her life. While the second act is about the three female Erinyes inflicting punishment upon Bruce for his crimes against women.
- Foreshadowing:
- Meredith mentioning that her thesis in college was deconstructing the myth of the muse and the erasure of female artists. The Muse can be seen as a reference here to Bruce's obsession with "taking things it finds beautiful", both artwork and women.
- Pay attention to the statue of the Erinyes and notice that Tisiphone is depicted with a hair full of snakes and holding a torch, Alecto has a dog's head, and Megaera wears something like a horned helmet. All these are elements related to their actual appearance. Tisiphone has a strong snake motif and Alecto can turn into a dog. Megaera is completely covered with a mask. They also use a torch to torture Bruce.
- An early jumpscare show a woman with a strange mask showing up through a glass that Meredith is looking at, her image overlaying the woman. For the rest of the story, Tisiphone represents Meredith among Bruce's recent victims.
- The statue depicts a man cutting his own throat at the punishment of the Erinyes. The movie ends with Bruce repeatedly slashing his throat with his claw.
- Genre Shift: The movie begins as a grounded horror movie with a few hints of supernatural elements. By Act Two, it has totally verged into Surreal Horror.
- Good Is Not Nice: If the Erinyes really are tormenting Bruce to deliver divine justice, they scare the hell out of Meredith as well, possibly with the intention of helping her avoid falling into Bruce's clutches.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: We get an extremely close-up shot of Meredith nervously picking at a hangnail.
- Halfway Plot Switch: The film begins by following women who are menaced by the serial killer Bruce. At the halfway point, the perspective switches to him as he's haunted by vengeful spirits.
- Hero of Another Story: It's implied that Meredith has spent the night in the woods while Bruce was having his hallucinations or hauntings. When she returns at the end of the movie, she has fashioned new clothes from materials she found (a tarp) and stopped her bleeding with a bandage around her neck.
- Ironic Echo: The movie starts with a scene of Bruce's latest victim on the ground of a living room, in a pool of her own blood. Act Two starts with a similar shot, but it's Bruce in a pool of blood.
- Just a Flesh Wound:
- Meredith gets several slashes into her throat deep enough to spray blood, yet she's still fit enough to feign death and later attack Bruce.
- Zigzagged with Bruce's broken skull. While Bruce does sometimes reel in pain when the wound is touched, he otherwise moves around without any seeming difficulty or pain through most of the film. He whips his head around and even presses his head against a door without any apparent discomfort. Even after having a seizure due to hitting his head, he remains perfectly mobile and unpained.
- Kill Him Already!: Meredith beats Bruce unconscious with the Erinyes sculpture, hitting him hard enough to crack his skull open, but rather than hit him one more time to cave his head in and seek immediate help for her slashed throat, she spends the rest of the night apparently hiding in the woods wearing a tarp and a duct tape bandage, watching him freak out.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: There's no clear answer as to whether the Erinyes really exist. All the seemingly supernatural stuff we see could be explained by injury/mania-induced hallucinations (Bruce's perception of them), trauma-induced paranoia (Meredith's perception of them), random chance (the opening door and malfunctioning record player), and a snake (triggering the lights and hitting the window).
- Never My Fault: Bruce's fatal flaw. He swears that everything is fine now that the Erinyes have killed "The Owl" and that he will never do anything bad again, since that was the bad part of him. The Erinyes demand he admit his part in it, which he refuses to do, ending with him dead.
- Not Quite Dead: After the first attack, Meredith feigns being killed before attacking Bruce with the statue of the Erinyes and escaping.
- Retraux: The movie is shot on 16mm film, with visible grain and saturated colors that are meant to emulate the 70s. That said, the movie is very strongly set in the modern era and hides nothing of the technology and trends of the time.
- Self-Disposing Villain: While getting his head cracked open by Meredith sets him down the path, it's Bruce who vanquishes himself due to his mania and hallucinations. Ultimately, he slashes his own leg and then repeatedly slashes himself in the throat to kill himself.
- Significant Wardrobe Shift: Both Bruce and Meredith fashion replacement outfits for themselves that look suspiciously like togas, fitting with the Hellenic origins of the Erinyes.
- Split Personality: Defied. Bruce sees himself and The Owl as two completely separate entities, with him being forced to commit his crimes on the behest of The Owl. The Erinyes challenge that, with Tisiphone demanding him to acknowledge his own part in his crimes, which he profusely refuses. Bruce is portrayed as being a single person with terrible urges to which he succumbs, not someone who is being forced into his actions by a secondary personality.
- Stylistic Suck: The movie inserts a bunch of scratches into the film stock as part of its retraux style, mimicking an old, slightly damaged print.
- Switching P.O.V.: Kate, to Meredith, to Bruce, and finally back to Meredith.
