The Dance of the Foxes: an incandescent coming-of-age (review)

A sensitive first feature film from Valéry Carnoy, with an imperial Samuel Kircher as a young ingenuous boxer who the transition to adulthood and toxic masculinity will hit hard.

In the game of which the two will establish themselves as the favorite wild child of the French coming of age, the Kircher brothers pass the buck. In 2023, The Animal Kingdom showed us the eldest of the siblings, Paul, in the grip of a violent metamorphosis, the only way to atone for his pain in the face of the evils of a society rotten to the bone. A bodily trauma inherited by the youngest, Samuel, in The Dance of the Foxes. But where the first made a pact with his bestiality, the second on the contrary distances himself. At the beginning of the story, a fall of ten meters: that of Camille, a young boxer in sports studies, who escapes with a broken arm. More fear than pain, but a phantom pain that opens the floodgates to a wave of emotions hitherto foreign to the blond, long conditioned to listen to his body to the detriment of the rest. His flesh will heal but his identity (as a man, as an athlete, as a friend) will remain scarred by this accident. Far from animal transformation, he mutates into a sentient being, to the great dismay of his comrades and his best friend Mattéo.

Basically, Valéry Carnoy dissects less the body of his hero than the masculine dynamics of adolescence. He finds fraternity there first of all, strong in encouragement and hidden tenderness. Then comes cruelty, that which arises from what is left unsaid, from insults that we regret, from the cycle of collective violence. As for the young non-professionals who indulge in it, their spontaneity galvanizes Samuel Kircher’s performance, incandescent from start to finish, even in the heartbreaking silence of a friendly breakup. The Dance of the Foxes is the passion of youth which carries away everything in its path and leaves behind only a fallen friendship. The lights come back on, but the heart remains tight.

By Valéry Carnoy. With Samuel Kircher, Fayçal Anaflous, Jean-Baptiste Durand… Duration: 1h30. Released March 18, 2026