Wild Foxes
There’s a primal tension in Wild Foxes (La danse des renards), Valéry Carnoy’s close-quartered feature debut, which follows a gifted young boxer teetering on the brink of greatness and collapse. The camera – jittery, hand-held, unsparing – moves like a sparring partner itself, never letting us breathe too long before ducking in for another blow. When the lens zooms in, gnashing gumshields, slack jaws and contorted grimaces fill the frame, each thud of fist against flesh landing with visceral weight.
Set in a high-performance boarding school, the story follows Camille, a 17-year-old boxing prodigy whose promising rise is abruptly derailed by a freak accident – a fall during a routine trip to the nearby forest, where he and his best friend Matteo (Fayçal Anaflous) feed stolen meat to the stray foxes that roam there. Though Camille’s forearm heals quickly, his psychological wounds deepen, with Carnoy deftly mirroring this fracture in his faltering performance in the ring.
Despite boxing’s reputation as the loneliest of sports, Wild Foxes is deeply preoccupied with group dynamics. The team moves like a pack of wolves – tight-knit, fiercely competitive, governed by hierarchy and rivalry – watching Camille closely for any sign of weakness. His injury – and his refusal, or perhaps inability, to return in top form – drives a wedge, particularly between him and Matteo. Their friendship feels lived-in and tender, yet is shadowed by an inescapable sense of doom, even when they eventually make amends. Yas (Anna Heckel), Camille’s trumpet-playing, taekwondo-practising love interest, cuts a fascinating figure: not driven by medals but by a dream to teach. Her scenes with Camille are the film’s quietest, but also its most revealing.
Carnoy’s storytelling, like Camille’s punches, is sometimes wild but rarely without intent. The story’s climax, set against the drama of a tense fox hunt, injects a raw, almost primal intensity into Camille’s internal battle, blurring the lines between man and nature, predator and prey. While Wild Foxes occasionally falters in fully realising its metaphors, it consistently finds its footing in mood, performance and form. In the ring, youth is wielded as both weapon and shield; outside it, that same vitality gradually unravels, exposing the vulnerability beneath – and the painful process of learning to endure when the fight is far from over.
Christina Yang
Wild Foxes does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
Watch the trailer for Wild Foxes here:
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