by Alexander Holiday
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jai Courtney, Emily Browning, Damon Herriman, Claudia Doumit, Miranda Otto, Sam Neill, Olivia Colman
Intro:
… a strong and sharply comedic debut that plumbs the depths of suburban malevolence for its absurd potential to a fantastic degree.
Dario Russo’s debut feature The Fox is a cautionary tale dressed as black comedy. The film’s matter-of-fact magical realism tackles coercive control in intimate relationships with a twisted sense of humour, and features talking animals rendered in delightful animatronics. Nick (Jai Courtney) believes that he would have the perfect relationship with his fiancée, Kori (Emily Browning), if it weren’t for the small fact that she is having an affair with her boss, Derrick (Damon Herriman).
Self-assured, dull as dishwater, and an avid practitioner of missionary sex, Nick nonetheless reckons that Kori’s got “everything she needs right here.” Derrick’s wife, Diana (Claudia Doumit), has found an incriminating used condom in a puddle of dog vomit. Nick encounters a neighbourhood fox (voiced by Olivia Colman) who convinces him of a quick fix for Kori’s one niggling flaw: “a hole that changes people into whatever you want. Just push her in.” Nick ignores warnings about the fox’s tricks from a bystander magpie (voiced by the late Sam Neill), and lures Kori into the middle of the woods to push her into the pit. And indeed, Kori does come back changed. She is now overly pliant, with a renewed sexual appetite.
The cramped small town atmosphere is best conveyed through the recurring Thursday Schnitzel Night at the pub, where locals down dozens of beers, propose marriage, and beat each other bloody. It is in these hallowed halls that the secrets of the foxes are revealed to Nick: he isn’t the only one who’s tried to change his partner into the perfect wife. “Usually folks wait until after kids,” his father explains, “but I suppose your generation didn’t have a war.” Reminiscent of The Stepford Wives, there is something at work here altering the humanity of unsatisfactory spouses. The Fox deftly interweaves questions of how we accept social architecture of control and coercion into its fantastical romp, driven equally by the awkward and the violent truths of marital strife.
The town dynamic is masterfully woven, with Derrick’s exasperated terror meeting Diana’s selfishness head on, tempered by the boozy indifference of the bartender (Miranda Otto), muted hedonism of Nick’s mother (Heather Mitchell), and bombastic superstition of Kori’s father (Zlatko Burić).
Matthew Chuang’s cinematography luxuriates in the lush greens of the wine country. His technical skill effectively captures the claustrophobic situation: when the men set out fox hunting, the long lens flattens the hills behind them, enclosing them like a wall; Nick stumbles up a tightly twisting staircase almost blind drunk, as Kori scrambles onto his back, their bodies squeezed into the frame.
Sam Neill delivers a standout vocal performance, complete with scraping, nasal Australian vowels. Russo recounted at the Melbourne International Film Festival screening how the late actor based his performance on a real crow that he apparently ‘knew’ (Neill’s own words), whose call he likened to a “sad orgasm”: awk, awk, aaaawk.
Occupying the roles of writer, director, editor, and composer, Russo has delivered a strong and sharply comedic debut that plumbs the depths of suburban malevolence for its absurdist potential to a fantastic degree.
