Toxic masculinity, boxing, and cinema go hand-in-hand, with everything from Rocky and Raging Bull to Creed thrilling and terrifying in equal measure with their depictions of explosions of rage in the ring. Wild Foxes brings the action to a boarding school, where a young, up-and-coming boxing star will be transformed by the pressure of his coach and peers, who use his own fears against him.

Wild Foxes Is A Stunning Character Study

Last Summer breakout Samuel Kircher, who is representing two films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, stars in Wild Foxes as Camille, a young boxer attending a sports-focused boarding school where he’s clearly one of, if not, the best. His friends, composed mostly of fellow boxers, champion him after he wins an interschool match, throwing a rowdy locker room party and flexing their muscles to the iPhone camera. They hit themselves as much as they hit each other, desperate to show off their strength.

There’s a quieter side to Camille, though – he and his closest friend Matteo steal away from campus with bags of raw meat to feed the wild foxes that roam the forest surrounding their school. When one excursion leads to a near-fatal accident that Camille, against all odds, survives, it’s at first unclear how this will affect him. He’s left with a gnarly scar along his right forearm after 50-something sтιтches are removed, professing that he heals twice as fast as other people. He’s eager to get back in the ring and prove that this traumatic incident has had no effect on him.

Camille is tipped to represent France by fighting at the Euros, but his injury is suddenly all he can think about. Phantom pain appears, though his doctor insists nothing is wrong and that it’s all in his head. So, too, do his fellow schoolmates, who insist Camille is being dramatic as he storms out of the ring or shows flashes of unwieldy anger that feel out of place despite the growls, grunts, and punches that soundtrack the film.

Anxiety also rears its ugly head and Camille suddenly finds himself ostracized from those he once considered his closest friends, sending him into a tailspin of grief and rage. Kircher shifts between these two emotions as swiftly as he throws and dodges punches, his face capturing all the confusion Camille feels as he wrestles with his place at school and the importance boxing has in his life.

Wild Foxes really sits with the ways such a violent sport can shape the way young men feel about themselves and how it makes them treat each other. In such a compeтιтive world, loyalties can shift constantly and, with so much pent-up energy, bursts of violence punctuate every moment of their waking lives. First-time director Valery Carnoy films all this in тιԍнт close-ups and quick editing, zeroing in on Kircher’s face, which is somewhere in between the baby-faced innocence of youth and the hardened maturity he plays at in front of his friends.

Wild Foxes, in its depiction of these boys’ desperation for greatness, gets to some dark places. It doesn’t go full psychological horror, but there are moments of pure frightening rage when Camille buys into the idea that the pain is, indeed, in his head and does everything he can to ignore it. With its bracing sound design, every punch echoes with a bone-crunching boom that will make you wince. Wild Foxes can be deeply uncomfortable, and it will most certainly make you question why boxing is even a sport in the first place, but its story, in going deep into the psyche of one boy experiencing a coming-of-age in such an aggressive environment, resonates far beyond just the sporting world.

Wild Foxes premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the parallel Director’s Fortnight Section.