SXSW Review: “The Fox”

The Fox (Dario Russo, 2025) 3½ out of 5 stars

There’s something afoot in a small Australian town, a place where folklore combines with age-old desires and the modern world in a strange and unsettling mix. Director Dario Russo’s debut feature film, The Fox, presents a parable where unexpected plot developments lead us down a surprising path, both charming and deeply peculiar. If not every script beat quite comes together cohesively, the result is just eccentric and engaging enough to keep us watching, eyes glued to the screen to try to guess what happens next.

Jai Courtney (Netflix’s Kaleidoscope series) stars as Nick, a creature of habit whose primary responsibilities in life consist of helping his father manage the family farm. When he proposes to longtime girlfriend Kori (Emily Browning, One More Shot), it’s clear—in an awkward scene staged for maximum comic effect—that she is less than enthusiastic about the idea yet accepts anyway. He’s a boring, unimaginative man; we see their sex life, and it does not inspire.

And as we soon learn, Kori is banging her boss, Derek (Damon Herriman, Better Man),  from the local animal clinic, who’s married to Di (Claudia Doumit, Amazon’s The Boys series). Why Kori would therefore want to get hitched to Nick is a question best left for her to answer, but when both Nick and Di suspect the affair, they hatch a plan to return things to how they’d like them to be. In this they are aided by a fox.

Yes, a fox. The movie actually opens with a voiceover by Olivia Colman (Paddington in Peru), giving her opinion on all the area animal breeds and explaining how any one of them would give anything to trade places with a human. It turns out that she is, in fact, the voice of a neighborhood vixen (as in, female fox), who convinces Nick not to shoot her (she was preying on the farm’s chickens) in exchange for some assistance with his relationship problems. And just what does that assistance look like? It would spoil the fun to give it away, but anticipate a wild narrative twist.

Russo builds his universe with sharp technical proficiency, including the beautiful animatronics he employs for the fox, as well as for a cocky magpie voiced by Sam Neill (Rams). He deserves full kudos for the sheer oddball nature of the screenplay, even if it doesn’t always stick all the sequence landings. There’s a consistency of tone that carries the viewer through, and a delight in the dramatic mayhem that proves infectious, largely thanks to the very talented and game cast. I’m a dog person myself, but I’m down for The Fox.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.