Boxing movies are a dime a dozen and have been since the birth of cinema, or at least since the talkies. It’s a genre that offers instant gratification — because what’s more visceral and entertaining than watching two people beat the hell out of each other on screen?

Bringing something original to the genre is significantly harder, which is why Belgian writer-director Valéry Carnoy deserves kudos for making his feature début, Wild Foxes (La Danse des renards), stand apart from your typical testosterone-fueled slugfest.

He stages the action within a highly special location: an elite French sports-études boarding school where teenage athletes are selected to train throughout their high school years. The public institution seems to weigh as heavily on the young fighters as all the punches they take in the ring, driving them toward acts of desperation or self-sabotage as they try to becomes pros.

Wild Foxes adds an intriguing twist to the coming-of-age sports flick template, which it otherwise adheres to quite obediently. Its 17-year-old hero, Camille — played with tender intensity by Samuel Kircher — is the best fighter in his age group, the one with the most prospects of representing France in the Olympics one day. But a minor injury winds up setting him back in unexpected ways, making Camille question the brutality of his trade, and whether there are more things to life than becoming the next Marcel Cerdan (for those familiar with French boxing greats).

His surprising trajectory from feared pugilist to maligned outcast guides a film that questions the violence Camille commits in the ring, as well that committed against him by his fellow classmates, including best friend and sparring partner, Matteo (Fayçal Anaflous).

When we first meet them, the two are like buffed-up peas in a pod, training all day together, making barechested TikTok videos along with teammates LBF (Jef Jacobs), Nasserdine (Hassan Alili) and Coreb (Salahdine El Garchi), working hard but playing hard, too. When they’re not doing 10K runs or hitting the bag at the behest of their trainer, Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Durand), Camille and Matteo sneak out to the forest nearby the school, feeding stolen meat to stray foxes that lurk in the brush.

During one of their excursions, Camille falls off a cliff and nearly kills himself, walking away quite miraculously with only a nasty cut on his right arm. Soon enough he’s ready to put the gloves back on, but for some reason he can’t escape the trauma caused by his accident. He starts feeling phantom pain, refusing to fight or train, while panic attacks keep him up all night. At the same time, he meets a girl, Yas (Anne Heckel), who trains in taekwondo but has other interests, including playing classical music on a trumpet.

The dangerous fall and its aftermath push Camille — who we learn has been boxing since he was 8, spurred on by an abusive father — to open himself up to new experiences beyond the ring. That would normally be a good thing, except that within the competitive pressure cooker of a sports-études program, students are expected to perform at extremely high levels. The other boxers, especially rival LBF, begin to resent Camille for not carrying his weight with the team, driving a wedge between the young champ and best bud Matteo.

Carnoy keeps things fairly riveting from start to finish, peppering the drama with fits of violence and moments of respite, during which we retreat to the massive forest adjacent to the school. Some of the plot points can feel a bit belabored, including a fox hunt that forces its way into the third act without warning. But the director maintains a strong level of realistic tension, sticking to Camille’s side as the boy takes plenty of blows but dishes out plenty as well, jabbing his way towards a form of self-realization.

Returning to Cannes with two movies (this one and The Girl in the Snow) after making his debut in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer back in 2023, Kircher — son of actress Irène Jacob and brother of actor Paul Kircher (The Animal Kingdom) — carries the movie in compelling ways. He can appear vulnerable and waiflike in certain scenes, barely able to stand or defend himself, while in others he can seem brutish and explosive.

It’s this dichotomy that Wild Foxes constantly explores, searching for parallels between the young boxers fighting for their futures and the animals fighting to survive in the woods nearby. Both live in a ruthless world where, like Camille, you can suddenly go from hunter to being hunted. The question the film ultimately asks is whether a third way is at all possible, leading to a gripping final combat that’s much less a knockout than a bitter victory.