TO KILL A WOLF - Mark Reviews Movies

To Kill a Wolf, All the Better

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 31, 2025

Writer/director Kelsey Taylor's To Kill a Wolf is inspired by the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood," in that it features a woodsman, a girl with red—hair, in this case—covering her head, and a figurative wolf who invades the house of said girl's grandmother. The original story endures because it's filled with dread, both of the unknown and of having the known become dangerous without warning. In this story, Taylor taps into that sense of dread, too, although, unlike a fairy tale, there are no easy answers or plainly happy endings to be found here.

The girl who goes out to the woods is named Dani (Maddison Brown), and when we first meet her, the 17-year-old is lost, cold, and unconscious. The man who finds her is only known as the Woodsman (Ivan Martin) here. Yes, he is her rescuer, as the character with the same occupation is in the fairy tale, but there is much more to the man and the whole of this story than how the plot reflects the narrative we already know.

Indeed, the Woodsman is our entryway into this tale. He lives alone in a cabin in those woods, keeping to himself, except when he needs to travel to town for essentials and take payment from a local rancher (played by David Knell) for the use of his extensive property, and listening to music or trying to fix his record player's speakers at night. His back story is revealed gradually from the time we first encounter the man, but the impression of him as a melancholy loner, both shunning others and being shunned by them (A trip to a nearby shop is met with judgmental glares by some), is a strong one.

The Woodsman finds Dani, by the way, on one of his routine trips to the forest. He spends his days searching for and setting off traps placed by that rancher, because the man's cattle could be killed by wolves in the area. There's one more key detail to note about the Woodsman, which Taylor reveals fairly early in the film, and it's that he has a prosthetic foot and shin. It's little wonder, then, that he sympathizes with wolves that might become caught in one of those traps, but the full extent of why he does so is a puzzle that Taylor pieces together over time, finally revealing how much anguish this man is in and has been trapped in for a while.

Much of this film, then, is about its characters—not the gimmick of updating an old fairy tale or of reconfiguring it to fit some subversive purpose. This story exists on its own terms, taking cues from its inspiration without exclusively adhering to it, and more importantly, everything that happens here stems from who these characters are, what they have experienced, and how a chance meeting allows them to develop together.

All we know of Dani, because she doesn't say much after the Woodsman finds her and brings her back to his cabin, is that she is lost and was, according to her, on her way to her grandmother's house in a town some hours from the forest. Just as with the man who saves her from the woods, Dani's own past is a mystery for some time, but as the two sit in silence or vaguely speak of their lives, we can tell that something connects them—tragedy and trauma and an overwhelming degree of uncertainty about how to confront or deal with it.

Here, then, is a film that's as much about its mood as it is the secrets that are revealed, the ideas it puts forth, and the harsh realities with which it eventually wrestles. The backdrop is Oregon, captured with an appropriate aesthetic of gloom by cinematographer Adam Lee and, in the forest surrounded by great trees, making its characters look quite small in the face of an unforgiving world.

The Woodsman knows much about forgiveness, mainly because of the lack thereof in his own life. Others won't offer it to him, but more to the point, he won't forgive himself. He later tells Dani that he wants to help her because of some advice from old, late friend: If a person can't help oneself, that person should help others. For her own reasons, Dani is hesitant to accept help from anyone.

As the narrative flashes back to show Dani with her aunt (played by Kaitlin Doubleday) and uncle (played by Michael Esper) at the grandmother's house, we learn that she knows a lot about being made to feel small. The grandmother was no beloved figure—only a stern woman who wanted things her way and ensured that anyone close to her followed along. If she is the Red Riding Hood figure, the wolf, without saying too much, remains a predator in this story, but his variety of predation is to take advantage of what he sees as weakness and of putting on an air of sympathy. We're only broadly reminded of the wolf donning the grandmother's clothes in the fairy tale, because the screenplay has become so specific in its own scenario and characters.

Taylor's film is as harrowing as the story that has inspired it, albeit by grounding its tale in psychological and emotional realism, as opposed to fantasy. To Kill a Wolf gives us a pair of complex characters, examines who they are and where they have come from, and, in a seemingly hopeless situation, provides some hope that they might find a new way because of their time together.

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