Movie Reviews

A Date Night Goes Wrong in Shudder’s Disturbingly Surreal ‘A Wounded Fawn’

Published

3 years ago

December 1, 2022

A Wounded Fawn, the newest film from director Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor and Jakob’s Wife) adds to the resurgence of ‘70s nostalgia filmmaking and creates something that will surely stand out from the rest. It descends into terrifying chaos steered by an impressive acting duo.

The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival to acclaim and also played at Fantastic Fest, and will be premiering exclusively on Shudder on December 1.

Meredith (Sarah Lind: Jakob’s Wife,Wolfcop) is a museum curator trying to reenter the dating pool after an abusive relationship. She runs into Bruce (Josh Ruben: Scare Me, College Humor), a sweet but offputting man who invites her on a date to his secluded cabin. Little does she realize that this man is actually a mentally ill serial killer with his eyes on her as his next victim.

The film opens with an art auction around a recently found Greek statue depicting a man being attacked by gods for his evildoing, shaping the premise of the film.

Effectively cut into two parts, the first half of this film focuses on what you would expect with a serial killer luring a new female victim to his cabin in the woods, bearing many similarities to a film like Fresh. The second half turns into something else, surprisingly morphing into a different film that becomes far more sinister.

A Wounded Fawn Shudder Original — Some of the eerie cinematography of “A Wounded Fawn” – Photo Credit: Peter Mamontoff/Shudder

A Wounded Fawn was shot on 16mm film, with plot tropes and shot styles resembling ’70s cinema and using the iconic ‘70s-style bright red blood.

Style and color are a big highlight, especially since it merges the art world with Greek mythology, creating shots that could be paintings themselves and a production design that goes beyond the often drab look of modern horror films.

A Wounded Fawn 2022 — Some creature designs from “A Wounded Fawn” – Photo Credit: Shudder

The special effects work adds to the impressive look of the film. Many of them are practical and heavily featured; there’s a good amount of blood spilling in this cabin. There are also imaginative creature designs similar to Donnie Darko. The creatures didn’t always work for me, but their bold designs and uniqueness are extraordinary.

The acting in this film is a standout. The two main actors, Ruben and Lind, have a great dynamic: they have very little chemistry with each other, capturing the feeling of being stuck on a first date with someone who doesn’t click. The story is seen from both of their sides in different but sympathetic ways.

A Wounded Fawn Josh Ruben — Josh Ruben as Bruce Ernst in “A Wounded Fawn” – Photo Credit: Peter Mamontoff/Shudder

Knowing Ruben previously, it was difficult for me to see him in the role of a psychologically-damaged, violent man; he usually plays a goofy character. But, in this film, his psycho side sometimes unsettled me.

A Wounded Fawn Sarah Lind — Sarah Lind in “A Wounded Fawn” – Photo Credit: Shudder

Lind comes off as a yearning, hopefully romantic, and also confident, surefooted woman, perhaps influenced by her love of art. In particular, her love of the famous hardcore performance artist and author Marina Abramovic.

The film also stars Malin Barr (Honeydew, The Beta Test) in a role that, while small, is impactful.

A Wounded Fawn Malin Barr — Malin Barr as Alecto in “A Wounded Fawn” – Photo Credit: Peter Mamontoff/Shudder

The film definitely touches on aspects that some might consider feminist, although considering it was written and directed by men, it does come off as a little simplistic — but hey, I’ll take it.

As Lind is an actress around 40 (although you would never know it looking at her flawless face), the film explores the themes of how difficult it is for older women to date, and broadly how dangerous it is for women of all ages in the same situation. The film in some ways could be viewed as a female revenge flick, particularly in the Greek mythology sense.

The dreamlike atmosphere of this film is aided by really fun camera work and editing that seems to have a lot of intention behind it, and some eerie sound design.

A Wounded Fawn isn’t perfect, but it was highly original and engaging for its runtime. It elevates the basic premise of a psychotic male killer by using surreal, and psychological elements. I can definitely see the last half being divisive, but those who are into chaotic and trippy horror films might enjoy A Wounded Fawn, streaming on Shudder now.

Check out the trailer below.

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Movie Reviews

‘Don’t Die’ Is a Good Friday Night Horror Film And That Is Enough.

Published

7 hours ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Don’t Die hits UK digital April 27 via Miracle Media. Benjamin Stark wrote and directed it. It played Panic Fest 2024 and spent the better part of two years making the quiet festival rounds, waiting for the right audience to find it. That audience is you.

What Happens

Jenks, played by Theodus Crane, needs medication he cannot afford. He breaks into a small-town pharmacy after hours. This was supposed to be clean. Nobody was supposed to be there. The pharmacist, Julia, played by Virginia Newcomb, was working late. She gets shot. Not knowing what else to do, Jenks takes her exactly where she tells him to take her.

This turns out to be a remote cabin run by a small collective quietly distributing medication to people who cannot access it through legal channels. The Robin Hood framing is warm, and the film offers it genuinely before slowly removing the warmth.

The Turn

The group running the cabin is not irrational. They believe what they are doing matters. They believe the math is simple. People need blood and organs, medication costs money, two strangers showed up and nobody outside knows where they are. Jenks figures out what that math adds up to about two minutes before the film shows it explicitly, and Crane plays the moment of comprehension exactly right. Quiet. Still. The kind of fear that does not move.

Stark earns the horror here because the people doing terrible things are not doing them out of cruelty. They have a system. They have a purpose. No villain monologue. No sadistic speech. They are calm and businesslike about it. That calm is what makes the third act work. Horror is rarely as effective as when the threat makes a kind of sense.

The Cast

Crane carries it. He plays Jenks as a man who keeps choosing decency as the available options narrow, and that consistency is what makes the back half hit as hard as it does. The performance never reaches for sympathy. It does not need to.

Newcomb as Julia is the other weight-bearing wall. She has the harder job. Her character moves from victim to something more complicated without the script telegraphing the shift. She handles it without calling attention to the handling.

Joshua Burge rounds out the central trio as Randy, the friend who shows up when needed and clocks the situation faster than any reasonable person should. If you don’t have a Randy in your life, make sure to get one.

What It Is and Is Not

Don’t Die was marketed as horror. It earns the label by the end, but it arrives there through crime thriller territory, and the patience of the first two acts is deliberate and correct. The tension builds quietly. When the horror finally arrives it lands harder because of the time spent getting there.

The budget limitations are present and real. Small locations, a tight cast, minimal spectacle. Stark works within them rather than against them, and for the most part it does not show. The pacing stumbles in the back half, running about five minutes longer than it should in the wrong places. There are moments where the momentum stalls. Neither is fatal.

It does not have much to say about healthcare beyond using it as a mechanism for the plot. That is fine. Not every film needs a thesis. This one tells a good story, maintains tension across most of its runtime, delivers a few genuine scares, and knows exactly what it is. Most low-budget horror manages one of those things.

Don’t Die is on UK digital now. Good Friday night film.

Movie Reviews

Content Is Now on Digital. Watch It Twice.

Published

12 hours ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Content, Adam Meilech’s screenlife horror satire, arrives on UK digital April 27 via GrimmVision following a strong festival run that included Grimmfest 2025. The whole film plays out across phones and laptop screens. It opens on a sham. It ends somewhere you did not expect to go.

What It Is

The opening scene drops you inside Therapals, a fake online therapy platform where the therapists are just untrained people trying to earn a paycheck. The first patient our protagonist connects with has the energy of an angry Ryan Reynolds and, with complete calm, tells her he is thinking about killing his neighbor.

From there Meilech begins stacking story on top of story in a way that will either lose you or thrill you, and which one depends entirely on your tolerance for the extremely meta. At the center is AJ, played by Meilech himself: actor, writer, director, stalker, kidnapper, psychopath.

While there is a clear line to be drawn from Content and Milk & Serial, Meilech provides a wonderful villain. His polite swagger and genuine enthusiasm make one of the most powerfuly wicked online personas I have seen in a while.

The Cast and the Method

The cast is Megan Boehmcke, Alex Mills, and Vaune Suitt alongside Meilech, operating under conditions that range from unpleasant to genuinely alarming. AJ records himself playing therapist to himself and plays the recordings back. He pays a stranger to pose as a mentor figure for his male actor, who believes he is in on a bit the whole time. He performs takes over and over in the Kubrick tradition until he gets what he wants. Eventually he just moves his lead into his apartment.

To get a real reaction during a shoot, he shows up and actually hits the actor. The poor actor, still in the scene, asks if they can reshoot. This dude is so desperate for a part, he is willing to show he can make his pain more entertaining.

Where It Sits

The several story arcs running at once can be genuinely hard to follow and Content is not interested in making things easier. That is a feature, not a flaw. The bad guy is normal looking. He lives in a shared apartment. He does not signal his intentions in any way that would help you see it coming. There is real secondhand cringe to watching private moments captured without the subjects knowing, which is the film’s most effective trick, and Meilech commits to it completely.

It lands somewhere between Milk and Serial and Creep in the first half, and ends up closer to Funny Games meets Better Watch Out by the final act. That is an unusual place to land. It is also exactly the right one. Content is available now on UK digital via GrimmVision.

Movie Reviews

‘And Her Body Was Never Found’ Takes Found Footage Somewhere New

Published

4 weeks ago

April 2, 2026

Luna Gray

Mor Cohen and Polaris Banks made a film about their real relationship. It opens the way you might expect a film about a real relationship to open, which is to say: uncomfortably.

The film opens on a man masturbating onto his wife’s chest while the two of them sit in a river. This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is very much a metaphor, but it is also literally happening on screen. He keeps asking her to take her yop off. She doesn’t want to. He keeps asking anyway, because that is what this man does with every limit he runs into, he treats it as a negotiation he is already winning.

This is how And Her Body Was Never Found introduces itself at SXSW 2026. Buckle up.

Two Bodies in the Frame

After the river, the cinematography immediately tells you where you stand. We see the back of her head in close-up, frame-filling, a wall of hair and refusal. He is in the far distance behind her, trying to to keep up. She is not waiting. You read the entire relationship before anyone opens their mouth again.

When they do sit down, she offers him a sandwich. It is a peace offering. It is an olive branch. In the context of this relationship, it is a mistake, because he immediately uses the olive branch to restart the argument. If you have ever loved someone profoundly frustrating, this scene will reach through the screen and grab you by the collar in the most empathetic possible way.

The fight spirals the way real fights spiral, not toward a point but away from one. Semantics get weaponized. He gaslights. The argument rolls over everything except the actual subject. She gets to the point where she raises a stick, and honestly, given the last forty-eight hours, a jury of her peers would understand completely. At the campsite that evening, she tells him she is done. The marriage is over.

The next morning, he says everything right. Every single thing. The full lovebombing playbook: the apology that sounds like he finally gets it, the warmth that feels real, the version of him she fell for showing up right on schedule. Anyone who has ever stood at that crossroads recognizes this moment in their bones. The film does not editorialize. It just watches.

The Cliff Scene

The film’s pivot arrives at a cliff overlook, with something that sounds unmistakably like Wizard of Oz music underneath it. She stands away from the cliff edge, keeping her distance from him. The film makes it clear she is briefly considering how easy it would be to resolve this situation unilaterally. He guilts her onto the ledge through emotional blackmail dressed as a trust exercise.

And then he pushes her.

This is where And Her Body Was Never Found breaks itself open. The take ends. The characters step out. Mor and Polaris are no longer their characters. They are Mor and Polaris, and he is furious about where his hand landed, and she is shaken in a way that does not feel scripted, because it is not scripted, because this part is not the movie anymore. She refuses to continue the scene.

The fourth wall does not just come down here. It gets dismantled and examined.

Blair Witch Country

A cut to night. She is in her tent, filming herself on her phone in vertical format. The frame is narrow and confining. The dark outside is absolute. She says out loud that it would be easy to kill her out here and get rid of the body. Nobody would know.

The Blair Witch Project comparison is not subtle and does not need to be. It is being invoked consciously, as a reference point for what it feels like when the camera becomes the only witness. The found footage mode here is not an aesthetic choice so much as evidence collection, and the film is smart about what that implies.

The film’s formal announcement that it is a meta project, two filmmakers making something about their own fights, arrives here. It reconfigures everything that preceded it without invalidating any of it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat

This is also where the film begins to strain, just slightly. And Her Body Was Never Found has already broken the fourth wall once, then reconstructed it, then broken it again. Characters comment on the layers. The commentary becomes its own layer.

The film ends somewhere past the point where you can usefully track what is cinema and what is meta and what is real. That disorientation is partly the point. It is also, at a certain moment past the film’s last clean beat, a miscalculation. The movie keeps going after it has already landed.

What Banks and Cohen Got Right

A lot, is the answer. The performance dynamics are precise in a way that indie horror rarely achieves. The cinematography is working on multiple levels simultaneously. The abuse arc is drawn with enough specificity to feel observed rather than constructed, which is not a small thing when both filmmakers are also the subjects.

Polaris Banks and Mor Cohen are making something genuinely new here. Other critics at SXSW noted how cleverly written the film is. That is true. It is also, in places, too clever for its own good, and the film never entirely resolves the tension between those two facts. The overreach at the end does not undo what precedes it. It just means the thing that is most impressive about this project, the willingness to keep pushing the structure past the point of comfort, is also the thing that gets it into trouble in the final ten minutes.

At seventy-five minutes, it is still a tight film that keeps the tension high and earns most of its ambition. The structural risks it takes are real risks, not aesthetic posturing. And the film it is in conversation with, the long tradition of found footage as emotional exposure, is richer for having this in it.