The Fox (2022) by Adrian Goiginger - Review

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by Adrian Goiginger

grade: 7

The Fox might at first seem to be one of the many (too many?) films that depict a special friendship between humans and animals. And when approaching such stories, the risk of creating something overly rhetorical is higher than ever. Adrian Goiginger, fortunately, has managed to avoid such mistakes, focusing mainly on the childhood traumas of the young protagonist. At the Diagonale’23.

Friends

Young filmmaker Adrian Goiginger immediately gained popularity when he made his debut feature, The Best of All Worlds (2017). In this extremely touching story, the director recounted an important episode from his childhood, focusing on the figure of his mother (played by Verena Altenberger), a heroin addict at the time. And after a feature film that, on the contrary, did not particularly meet the expectations of audiences and critics ( Above the World, 2021), here he is back in the theatres (and at the Diagonale’23) with The Fox, his third feature film, also with a strong autobiographical component, centred specifically on the figure of his great-grandfather Franz Streitberger.

In The Fox, therefore, the story begins in 1927, when Streitberger was living in the Pinzgau with his parents (Karl Markovics and Karola Niederhuber) and his many siblings. Forced to live in extreme poverty, his parents decide to sell Franz to a far more wealthy farmer (Cornelius Obonya), so that they can guarantee him a more comfortable life. Once an adult, Franz (played by Simon Morzé) starts working as a motorbike courier for the army. World War II has now broken out. Franz constantly seems to be an outsider, but when he meets a wounded fox cub, he decides to take it with him, finding in it his first, true friend.

The Fox, then, might initially seem to be one of the many (too many?) films that stage a special friendship between humans and animals. And when approaching such stories, one knows that the risk of creating something excessively rhetorical or, even worse, cloying, is higher than ever. Adrian Goiginger, fortunately, has managed to avoid such mistakes, concentrating mainly on the young protagonist’s childhood traumas, his fear of being abandoned again, and the parallels that link him and the fox cub, who was also left alone since his mother had walked into a trap.

The first part of the feature film, when, precisely, we see Franz as a child living together with his parents, takes on, in the course of the film, an ever greater significance (the scene in which his father explains to him why he should not be afraid of death is particularly impressive in this regard). The Fox, then, is a parable about friendship, the importance of affection and good feelings with one of the most dramatic wars in the background. Adrian Goiginger focuses on minimalism, opting for a 4:3 format reminiscent of old photographs and making long silences and evocative open spaces his workhorse. After Above the World, then, The Fox undoubtedly represents a quantum leap in Goiginger’s filmography. A film that often draws on what has been made overseas, which, while relying heavily on emotionalism, manages to manage a constant good-naturedness well overall, without letting it take over everything.