Wild Foxes: the body keeps the score in this affecting drama about an injured young boxer

Though Belgium’s filmmakers can hardly stake an exclusive claim to the crafting of sensitively wrought stories of young people facing adult-sized challenges and crises, they’ve made many of this decade’s most distinctive and affecting examples. A thoughtful debut feature by Valéry Carnoy which won two major prizes upon its premiere in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last year, Wild Foxes joins a body of exceptional youth-centric work that includes Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022), Anthony Schatteman’s Young Hearts, Leonardo Van Dijl’s Julie Keeps Quiet (both 2024) and Cecilia Verheyden’s Skiff (2025). It’s also worth noting that Belgium’s most decorated directorial duo, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne – who also co-produced several of those films – recently returned to the subject of adolescent hardships with Young Mothers (2025). 

Like Julie Keeps Quiet and Skiff, Carnoy’s drama is centred on a teenage athlete. In the case of Wild Foxes’ Camille (Samuel Kircher), early scenes emphasise both his talents in the ring and his warm bond with Matteo (Fayçal Anaflous), his best friend since childhood and constant companion at the sport boarding school where they both live. 

The two teens share a fascination with the foxes in the forest beyond the academy grounds, which they feed with pieces of meat stolen from the school’s kitchen. During a trip into the woods one afternoon, Camille stumbles and falls from a high ledge. Though the rest of the accident goes unseen, the horrific sights amid the aftermath – both in terms of Camille’s grisly injuries and the bloodied clothes of his rescuer Matteo as he sits in the hospital hallway – are suggestive of lasting impacts for them both.

Much to the relief of Camille’s mother Savina (Stephanie Goemaere) and coach Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Durand), the young boxer’s physical recovery progresses very swiftly. But deeper signs of his trauma manifest as feelings of phantom pain and anxiety, resulting in a reluctance to fight. Sensing weakness in their pack’s former alpha and resenting the special status Bogdan still accords him, the other boxers treat Camille with increasing disdain. The escalating hostilities put more pressure on his fraying friendship with Matteo, whose past infractions put him at risk of expulsion from the school.

The sensitivity of both characters lends an uncommon poignancy to the film’s more familiar portrayal of the increasingly toxic dynamics at work within a group of young men. Scenes that could have been routine showcases for adolescent cruelty and brutality incorporate more surprising notes.

Carnoy wisely sidesteps another predictable element of most teen movies and boxing flicks alike, when Camille’s growing closeness to Yas (Anna Heckel) – a taekwondo student who’s new to the school – yields something other than the expected romance. The director knows that any such turn would be redundant since Wild Foxes is already remarkably potent as a story of love and heartbreak, situated within its central bromance. Moreover, the fact that Yas – who’s endearingly nonplussed when faced with all this raging teen-boy hormonal overload – has ambitions and interests beyond her chosen sport becomes one of many developments that nudge Camille toward a new understanding of himself.

Shifting into features after showing a knack for empathetic storytelling in his excellent shorts Ma planète (2018) and Titan (2021), Carnoy grounds the film in his own experiences as a teen athlete who endured a life-changing accident like Camille’s. What he witnessed at school inspired his clear-eyed account of a struggle for supremacy within a charged context that’s already built around matters of competition. The director is equally astute when it comes to his take on boxing culture and its carefully ordered codes of masculinity and violence. But he also shows the ways in which those same codes can have positive effects in their fostering of connection and community. The references to Camille’s abusive and now-absent father add significance to the gently paternal concern Bogdan expresses alongside the usual tough love.

Just as impressive is Carnoy’s ability to marshal the collective energy of a cast that combines first-time actors with the relatively seasoned likes of its leading man. The son of actors Jérôme Kircher and Irène Jacob, Kircher demonstrated his own prodigious gifts in his breakout role in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer (2023), playing a boy having an affair with his stepmother. Here, as Camille, he maintains the clarity of a character who – like many real-life teenagers – threatens to feel overwhelmed by his many competing drives. He is racked between his deeply instilled drive to succeed, his feelings of fear and helplessness, the reassurance he finds in his physicality and his heartbreaking eagerness to love and be loved.

► Wild Foxes is in UK cinemas from 1 May.