Wild Foxes: Review by Alex Petrescu
Mending Phantom Bones
After suffering an accident, young Camille is fighting against his own weakness.
by Alex Petrescu
Valéry Carnoy’s Wild Foxes is all muscle—resting on young teenage bones as much as it’s resting in traps set out in the wilderness. Studying and training for the European boxing championship in a remote French elite sports school, young Camille (Samuel Kircher) spends his spare time hanging stolen slabs of meat in the surrounding forest, watching foxes jump, grab, and eat it. This unawareness of one’s place in the primordial hierarchy sets the story’s tone.
Mankind often overlooks its fragility. Not only the physical kind, but also psychological and social ones. There’s a masquerade in performing many almost-ritualistic behaviours to attain a reputation with one’s peers. Building on his previous short film, Titan (2021), Carnoy takes another look at the notion of simulated group masculinity, this time within a much more immersive universe. Boys, inhaling their testosterone-fueled sweat, are chanting and grunting while flexing their muscles at the camera, filming TikTok videos, bearing close resemblance to a group of hectic primates.
At first, Camille is one of the stars of the group; he’s a boxing prizefighter and therefore a winner on the social ladder. Yet, his life rolls down the hill when he suffers a serious accident that renders him incapable of fighting for a couple of months. We’re quickly drawn into this carefully crafted realm with the help of smartly shifting image formats, from the classic Academy ratio of 1.37:1 to the new vertical screen medium, showing recordings made by the boys and thus getting a peek into their worldview.
Carnoy, doubling as the screenwriter, fleshes out a story that avoids all expected tropes. The young boxer, despite gaining a certain emotional sensibility, doesn’t forsake boxing as a cruel or destructive sport. Instead, he copes with the phantom pain and psychological stress of the accident by embracing it. While his body is getting tougher and absorbing more punches, his psyche becomes more sensitive in regards to the pain he inflicts on others, although he hardly grasps the changes he’s going through himself and rejects professional help. Not reaching for easy epiphanies – staging an internal battle with unclear outcomes instead – adds considerable depth to the script’s character study.
Foxes are solitary creatures, and so are boxers. These stray animals are never used as a direct symbol; the camera respects their need for space, positioning itself further away. The distance is being kept between the boy and the stray animals, too, with whom he doesn’t directly interact. It’s as if he understands their need for individuality that transcends their kin. Although he was unarguably an important part of a tightly knit social structure, the school’s boxing group, he innately understands the foxes’ character. This individuality that both possess creates a need to strengthen oneself to survive the food chain.
It’s never easy to survive out there, but despite the odds Wild Foxes carefully dodges common coming-of-age cliches, building a character that fights a seemingly never-ending match between himself and two opponents: his own pain and the one he inflicts on others.
Director: Valéry Carnoy
Writer: Valéry Carnoy
Cast: Samuel Kircher, Faycal Anaflous, Jef Jacobs, Anna Heckel, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Hassane Alili, Salahdine El Gharchi, Yoann Blanc, Guillaume Duhesme
Running time: 92 min
Country: Belgium/France
Year: 2025
©FIPRESCI 2025