Wild Foxes

Coming of age is a bruising experience for the teenagers in Valery Carnoy’s tense feature debut. Young Camille (Samuel Kircher, the younger brother of Winter Boy star Paul) may be used to going up against another of the kids in the boxing ring at his elite boarding school for athletic prodigies but it’s the pack mentality that is a more tricky opponent.

Cam, as his mates call him, is top dog, popular not because he displays a bravado much different from his best mate Matteo (Fayçal Anaflous, making an impressive debut), team rival LBF (Jef Jacobs) – whose nickname stands for “Lil Punch Freak” – or the rest of his gang but because he’s considered the best of them in the ring. Pushed to excel by the adults around them, especially their coach Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Durand), there’s a tendency towards excess in all areas, not least in the testosterone-fuelled changing room celebrations after a successful bout. Swapping from Arnaud Guez’s sinuous camerawork to judicious inclusion of mobile phone footage that appears shot by the boys adds believability, intensity and verisimilitude to these early interactions.

“You succeed, I succeed,” Matteo tells Cam as he puts him through his paces – which all sounds very Three Musketeers, until you consider what the flipside of that might be. That possibility rears its head soon enough after Cam, who along with Matteo, has a hobby tying mea to a tree in order to attract and observe the local foxes, has an accident. This, though you Carnoy ensures we see it coming, doesn’t unfold quite as you imagine it might, like much of the plot development. The Belgian filmmaker quickly proves to be a director who is quite nimble with a feint in his own terms, so that when his punches come they often hit in unexpected places.

Cam ends up being hefted to hospital by Matteo with a nasty injury that will put him on the sidelines for a while. Suddenly instead of being in the middle of the action he is on the periphery, a shift in perspective that makes him begin to question the group mentality and brutality of the sport.

Carnoy’s film is all about dualities and this sort of fluidity of viewpoint, which is why the English title of Wild Foxes feels like a blunt instrument compared to the much more nuanced “dance of the foxes” suggested by the original name. When Carnoy observes Cam and his mates from certain angles we can see their strength and confidence, but at other times it’s evident that their childhood hasn’t fully been shed yet, especially emotionally. This is brought home, not just by their impulsiveness, but in their interactions with the girls at the school. Carnoy has a feel for the softness and insecurities that lie just beneath the bravado. Props too must go to the prop department and production designer Yasmina Chavanne, whose employment of clutter makes every inch of the boys’ rooms and gym redolent of strong emotion and sweat. Even a hotel room we see Cam in later has already had its corporate neatness annihilated by his stuff.

Rising star Kircher – who can also be seen in fellow Cannes Directors’ Fortnight entry The Girl In The Snow) – is also in tune with both sides of Cam’s personality, with a sweet friendship that develops between him and trumpet-playing taekwondo student Yas (Anna Heckel, filling her small role with bags of personality). Carnoy shows a lot of maturity as a filmmaker by not leaning too heavily into any of this, or the metaphor of the foxes, so that his drama remains rooted in realism rather than feeling formulaic. Cam’s doubts inevitably lead to problems as the other boys have been taught not to tolerate weakness and Carnoy is also alive to the way that the strength of teenagers’ friendships can also be matched by fury if the ‘rules’ are not observed. Although the filmmaker also uses the arc of a tournament to gently shape his narrative, he avoids the usual cliches by ensuring it’s Cam’s internal psychological fight that’s the dominant note.

Reviewed on: 20 May 2025