Director – Valéry Carnoy – 2026 – Belgium, France – Cert. 15 – 91m
***1/2
A promising young school boxer’s mindset changes following an accident which damages his arm – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 1st
This starts off with the camera darting nimbly around a boxing ring in a gym in which two teenage fighters (one in red, one in blue) spar while their compatriots and trainer spur them on from the sidelines. Camille (Samuel Kircher), in blue, is the winner. Afterwards, five of them lark around in the changing rooms, filmed on a smartphone. (The French title, with its reference to dancing, seems particularly apt here.)
A coach journey. Camille rehearses his fighting moves in a mirror and hangs up the medal round his neck. And on a football field with a team mate. And back in the gym. Which routine is interrupted when his trainer Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Durand) summons him for a talk with the director. The dates have come through for the Brussels competition in June, but rather than train alongside his professional team mates, Cam wants to stay at the gym and practice with his friend Matteo (Faycal Anaflous) – who has been warned by the gym, one more screw up and you’re out. Which does not sound like a recipe for success.
At canteen lunch, one of the lads brings a girl, Yas (Ana Heckel), a Taekwondo student, over to their table, which allows for the introduction of the five by name – Pierre aka LPF (Jef Jacobs), Camille, Matteo, Coreb (Salahdine El Gharchi) and Naser (Hassane Alili). Later, Camille and Matteo steal some food from the canteen freezer. They string pieces of meat up on the branches of a tree in the nearby woods. The wait, and watch a small fox leap up to devour the meat, then follow it. Matteo leaves, while Cam finds himself on a huge (concrete?) ledge where he films himself fooling around in a sequence which may set you on edge if you have problems with heights. He spots the fox down below, then slips. Matteo runs through the forest to help, but is too late.
Matteo waits in the hospital. The doctor operates. Cam was lucky the artery on his wounded arm is intact. When he comes to, his mother tells him, no training for two months. He seems surprisingly at ease with all this, but on the ward at night, he tosses and turns, getting up to unwrap his bandaged arm to take a look (we don’t see what he sees, cutting to a shot of his arm without the stitches some weeks later as he shows it to is gym mates). In the school gym (for that is what is is) trainer Bodgan has Cam spar with Coreb, but Cam’s arm starts playing. up. Wandering the corridors after icing his arm, he watches Yas the a door training at her Taekwondo class. Matteo phones him at the meat tree; Matteo, LPF and Nasser were selected for the upcoming school match.
At night, Cam wakes with debilitating chest pains. He is found by his teacher, but doesn’t want his coach to know. That’s hard when he can’t get through his usual weight training routine. After hanging around with his peers, he sneaks off to watch Yas, who is playing a trumpet in a forest clearing.
His physio can find nothing wrong, says Cam shouldn’t be feeling any pain. He gives coach a note saying he has tendonitis, which means no sparring for two weeks (running’s fine). He shows Yas the meat tree, talks about “psychological pain”. Running with the others, he can’t keep up, and Matteo gets into a fight on his behalf.
After damaging his head in the locker room ritual of ‘smash the can’, wherein each person smashes a beer can against their forehead, Cam spots a fox that’s got into the school premises. It won’t come to him. It’s later found dead in the playground, and the director makes an announcement that they’re going to cull the foxes in the nearby woods. Distance starts to grow between Matteo and Cam, after Cam deletes his video of his friend fighting in the boxing competition.
After the fake tendonitis note comes to light, Bogdan successfully puts cam through an intensive training session, and talks abut putting him in the next inter-schools championship to see if he’ll be okay for the upcoming European competition. LBF gets into an altercation with Yas, drawing blood on her face just before she shoots, with Cam’s help, an entry for a music competition in which she’s playing the trumpet. LBF is less than happy when coach Bogdan puts Cam alongside him and Coreb in the European competition.
Cam finds himself winning against an opponent who is bleeding profusely, and abandons the fight to the horror of his coach and team mates. He goes to the woods, punches the trees, makes his knuckles bleeding and raw. He finds his room ransacked. He goes to Yaz, who offers him a bed (“I’m used to it, with my brothers”). On the day of the fox cull, Cam flees into the woods to avoid being beaten up by Matteo and LPF, who pursue him. Result: LPF is suspended, Matteo is expelled, and after a “constructive” chat with his coach, Cam is kept on the team. In the ring for the competition, he is still fighting his own demons. Matteo is on the sidelines, cheering him on. Which may make all the difference…
There’s something strangely affecting about all this. For a start, the young, (mostly) male cast are superb, particularly Kircher who conjures a protagonist who following his accident feels there is something medically wrong with him even though all the medical professionals say otherwise. You really feel as though, despite the evidence, they’ve somehow diagnosed him wrong and missed whatever the problem is. But the narrative never comes down one side or the other, and it could well be that, as everyone else suspects, the problem is indeed in his head.
There’s a freshness both about the performers and, also, the way the film is shot, the handheld feel somehow perfectly capturing the teenage years when people are working out their identity and everything is up for grabs. That’s filtered through the idea of competitive fighting sports in which it’s assumed you need to exercise a killer instinct to defeat your adversaries, and ignore the fact if they appear to suffer in the process.
The foxes in the woods, which Cam feeds when he’s not supposed to, provide the perfect metaphor for the boy who may be mentally ill and is badly let down by the protocols of his chosen sport. They are the lower end of a damaged social eco-system in which Cam goes from being a perfect fit to an outsider via his accident.
Wild Foxes is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, May 1st.
Trailer: