Producer:  Adam Lee, Kelsey Taylor, Ricky Fosheim and Zach Golden   Director: Kelsey Taylor   Screenplay: Kelsey Taylor   Cast: Maddison Brown, Ivan Martin, Kaitlin Doubleday, Michael Esper, David Knell, Annika Cowles, Julie Knell, Jessica Catalano, Grant Joy and Dana Millican   Distributor: Bright Iris Film  

Grade: B

In her debut feature writer-director Kelsey Taylor addresses a common subject in contemporary drama—overcoming trauma.  But while doubling down on it, portraying two sufferers who help one another, she handles the issue cleverly, in the form of a tale inspired by the Little Red Riding Hood story, and secures strong performances from her cast.  “To Kill a Wolf” is a compelling, imaginative and becomingly modest treatment of a topic that’s quite familiar in contemporary fiction but is given welcome freshness here. 

The plot unfolds in a series of interlocking chapters. In the first, Ivan Martin is introduced as The Woodsman (only at the end is her name revealed as Jonah), who lives a reclusive existence deep in the Oregon forest.  A big, shaggy fellow, he’s introduced lumbering his way through the brush—it’s revealed early on that he has a prosthetic foot—using a metal detector to find wolf traps that he disables; they’ve been set by a rancher (David Knell) who pays The Woodsman a monthly sum to allow his cows to forage on the property.  On the occasions that he goes into town to shop the Woodsman is treated with muted hostility by the locals; the reason behind the dislike, and his prosthesis, is withheld until later in the film.  At home his major interest is in fiddling with his hi-fi system to keep the bass as prominent as he likes and arguing with a stuffed raccoon he calls Dave (why he will eventually explain).

While searching for the traps one day the Woodsman encounters a young woman unconscious from the cold and takes her to his cabin.  She’s Dani (Maddison Brown), a seventeen-year old who after recuperating for a time explains that she’s trying to get to her grandmother’s house.  At first The Woodsman, exasperated that she’s messed with the controls on his amplifier and that she told the rancher that she’s his niece, orders her to take the bus there, but eventually he agrees to drive her, a trip of a couple hours.  When they arrive, however, they find the place deserted, and Dani admits that her grandmother, with whom she’d lived after her mother had passed away, is dead.

That leads to a flashback chapter in which Dani is preparing to leave the deceased woman’s house with her new guardians, her mother’s sister Jolene (Kaitlin Doubleday) and her psychologist husband Carey (Michael Esper).  The evening they spend before departing is uncomfortable: Jolene rants about her mother having been severe and uncaring, and while Carey tries to smooth things over, he also shows Dani keepsakes her mother had left behind that Jolene intended to trash.  He expresses an almost clinical concern for the girl, who looks upon him as a mentor of sorts and asks him to critique essays she’s written, presumably as school exercises.

That leads the film back to its initial chapter, and to revelations by both The Woodsman and Dani about the traumatic episodes they’ve experienced, his simply told to his guest and hers, involving a modern breed of human wolf, dramatized in flashback.  In each case a degree of closure is achieved, but Taylor is no wide-eyed optimist: both The Woodsman and Dani remain psychologically damaged, but are now able to reach out to each other for understanding and support.

This description avoids revealing most of the particulars behind the characters’ turmoil to allow the surprises Kelsey’s built into her script to register; suffice it to say they carry a dramatic punch.  But it wouldn’t be as strong if it weren’t for the nuanced performances of Martin and Brown, who play off skillfully against one another as The Woodsman and Dani achieve a degree of trust neither has felt before.  Doubleday and Esper offer expert support, etching their characters in brief but effective strokes.  All benefit from the work of production designer Juliana Collins and cinematographer Adam Lee, who create a dark, claustrophobic mood not just in the interiors but even in the outdoor scenes of the Oregon woods; Lee’s emphatic use of close-ups adds appreciably to the chilly, oppressive atmosphere, as also do the ominous score by Sara Barone and Forest Christenson and Dawson Taylor’s lapidary editing.

In its original form the Red Riding Hood fable is exceptionally grim.  “To Kill a Wolf” is more hopeful, but the allusions to it help to make this modern variant a potent psychological study.

Producers: Adele Romanski, Mark Ceryak and Barry Jenkins   Director: Eva Victor   Screenplay: Eva Victor   Cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch, Hetienne Park, E.R. Fightmaster, Cody Reiss, Jordan Mendoza, Liz Bishop, Conor Sweeney, Alison Wachtler, Jonny Myles, Pricilla Manning, Celeste Oliva and Chhoyang Cheshatsang Distributor: A24

Grade: B

Writer-director Eva Victor tackles a delicate subject—a young woman’s struggle to cope with the traumatic aftermath of sexual assault—in “Sorry, Baby,” but does so in a quirky fashion that sometimes feels more affected than affecting.

As befits a story about a grad student in a writing program who becomes a college English professor, it’s a very literary piece, presented in a series of five chapters shuffled out of chronological order.  Agnes (Victor) is introduced welcoming Lydie (Naomi Ackie), her BFF, back to the house they shared as students at a liberal arts college in New England.  As part of a giggly, dorm-room-style reunion punctuated by an astonishingly large number of F-bombs, Lydie reveals that she’s pregnant, which is something to celebrate.  But Agnes is clearly still unsettled by an incident in her past over which Lydie commiserates with her, and when they go out to a dinner hosted by one of their erstwhile classmates, perpetually sour Natasha (Kelly McCormack), Lydie has to hold her hand under the table during the rough moments.

The next chapter jumps back to their grad school days, when Agnes was a favorite student of charming Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi), the thesis advisor with whom she had an easy familiarity.  One night he scheduled a conference not in his office but at his home, and it was then that something of a sexual nature occurred.  We don’t witness the actual event: Victor presents it obliquely, shooting the house from outside in a series of shots from afternoon into the night, when Agnes emerges shaken and spent.  (The sequence might remind you of the famous tracking-shot murder, from inside to the bustling street outside, in Hitchcock’s “Frenzy.”)

Agnes recounts what occurred to Lydie, who accompanies her to the hospital the next day, where a doctor responds brusquely when she says she hadn’t reported the incident to the police and had bathed before coming in for treatment.  She does register a complaint with the college, but the administrators who meet with her—both women who say they couldn’t sympathize more—explain that as Decker has suddenly resigned, he’s no longer with the college and so isn’t subject to disciplinary action.

In the ensuing chapters Victor offers what amount to vignettes recounting how Agnes deals with the “bad thing” that happened to her at various stages of her advancement from graduate to TA and ultimately tenure-track professor at the college, leading a class studying—what else?—“Lolita.”  In one scene she adopts a stray kitten, which she then attempts none too successfully to hide beneath her coat when she goes to a grocery to buy cat food.  In another, she’s evasive when asked by a prosecutor during voir dire why she’d feel uncomfortable about serving on a jury.

Others show her reactions in dealing with men.  In that grocery sequence, she’s taken aback when she sees a customer she thinks is Decker.  But she enters a relationship with Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a shy but infatuated neighbor whose gentleness she appreciates.  And when she has a panic attack while driving, she pulls into the parking lot of a diner whose owner (John Carroll Lynch) tries to shoo her away saying the place is closed but he sees her distress and winds up not only making her a sandwich but having a long talk with her about dealing with stuff.

The film circles back as Lydie returns for another visit, this time with her partner Fran (E.R. Fightmaster) and their infant.  Though scared of the thought of being left alone the kid, Agnes agrees to babysit while the couple go off to visit other friends.  And in a strained conversation with Natasha, jealous because her rival’s gotten the permanent faculty position she’d sought for herself, Agnes learns that Decker spread his dubious charms on a canvas larger than she’d thought.

“Sorry, Baby” mixes moments that are tender, unsettling, and queasily funny in unexpected combinations.  What results is a sort of tragicomedy of intermingled joy and pain, and the mixture can seem clumsily forced.  McCormack plays Natasha to the hilt, for example, but the character feels like a sitcom figure at odds with the more realistic ones around her.  And though Hedges endows Gavin with genuine sweetness, that character too seems more a literary construct than a real human being.  While the doctor is portrayed as simply insensitive, moreover, one can, to a certain extent, sympathize with his irritation with yet another patient who ignores the right way to deal with a sexual offender (and perhaps a serial one).  The use of “Lolita,” moreover, is much too easy a touchstone for Agnes’ traumatic past.

The script also leaves one with lingering questions.  Why did Decker resign?  One suspects, given the administrators’ washing-their-hands-of-it attitude, that they’d arranged it with him after Agnes had indicated her intent to register a complaint, just to avoid trouble.  When the department head informs Agnes of the decision to give her the plum faculty position, he notes that “former faculty” had recommended her.  Was Decker among them?  And of course the extent of his misconduct is never fully revealed.

But while you can quibble over some of writer Victor’s choices about such things, the overall result works despite the occasional misstep: the character of Agnes is a nuanced portrait of a woman both gifted and vulnerable, and as an actress Victor inhabits its various qualities with undeniable skill despite a few moments of exaggeration.  And the rest of the cast is well chosen, with Ackie outstanding and Lynch a master of calibration as a fellow who initially seems gruffly dismissive but proves surprisingly perceptive.

Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry, in collaboration with Victor, production designer Caity Birmingham and costumer Emily Costantino, uses the Massachusetts locations effectively to create a faintly claustrophobic atmosphere for Agnes’ story, while the editing by Alex O’Flinn and Randi Atkin is commendably unhurried and Lia Ouyang Rusli’s spare score avoids pushing the obvious emotional buttons overmuch.

“Sorry, Baby” is an intermittently satisfying exhibition of Victor’s considerable talent as writer, director and actor.  It’s a debut feature imperfect like most, but of very real promise.