Cannes 2025 (Directors’ Fortnight): Wild Foxes (dir. Valéry Carnoy) | Review
Healing gets buried. Pain starts to resurface. Self-destruction explodes limitlessly. Valéry Carnoy’s Wild Foxes bares its fangs fiercely to unravel the mental wounds of teenage boxers without mercy in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight award-winning entry.
Camille (Samuel Kircher) records Yas (Anna Heckel) playing the trumpet with a fresh wound on her lips and examines her intensely. She resists her pain just to make sure the trumpet is played according to her standards, while her tears roll down, covering the wound. He sees her remain unbothered by the intense discomfort, her willpower reaching the skies—and in that instant, he freezes. Camille realizes that pain, in every other way, is a subjective form of victory.
Director Valéry Carnoy premiered his film in the Directors’ Fortnight alongside 18 other contenders, featuring Camille as a teenage boxer with immense talent and the skills to be the next big champion. He is the icon among his boxing mates, a pact of sorts—the boyhood bonds that ignite the flame of friendship. An unexpected accident leaves him with deep hand injuries, severe enough to require hospitalization. After recovery, he gets back on track to chase his dreams once again, but everything starts holding him back, leading to a spiral of emotional setbacks.
First and foremost, the trophy of excellence lands on Samuel Kircher for his portrayal of Camille, setting the brutality of the mind to a darker, shattering depiction. The analysis of physical and mental pain through the eyes of a teenage boy is awakened through Kircher’s razor-edge performance, transforming the film into something raw and intimate—a diary entry brought to life, its emotions spilling from the screen. Director Valéry Carnoy delivers the feel of an ambitious teenager losing faith over issues of male vigor, where the self-defense mechanism begins to arise to avoid self-degradation—the survival mode that drives a victim. Two different perspectives are examined through Camille: the will to withstand barriers and the urge for self-sacrifice collide, causing an inertia of instability to explode within him. Here, the ghosts of the past start to resurface: childhood traumas and mental health degradation begin to escalate, leading to a phase of mixed emotions.
However, the most striking element is its perspective on masculinity—not as performance, but as an inaudible, often fractured, core struggle. Carnoy examines the societal misinterpretation that men must withstand pain in silence, as if willpower lies only in suppression. But desolation is human, not gendered, and tears are not a flaw but the body’s rebellion against suffering—an essential release for the soul to breathe again. Suzana Pedro’s editing keeps the process of Camille’s testing phase structured effectively to convey his agony and emotional turbulence.
Wild Foxes (La Danse des renards), which won the Europa Cinemas Label Award and the SACD Prize, stays true to its title, delivering a ruthless yet energetic take on perseverance and the survival of the fittest within the influence of masculinity and coming-of-age setbacks. Whether it’s love, strength, mischief, or longing, teenage male boxers who live in a pact need each other to uphold their high survival instincts—even when physical reminders of failure threaten to push them into darkness. As healing lingers and pain resurfaces, motivation may come from a door less traveled, transforming every form of rivalry and distance into limitless strength.
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