The Fox

Adrian Goiginger's 2023 Austrian film rests on the story of the director's great-grandfather. As a child, Franz was taken from his family in a poor mountain village and handed to another farm as a labourer, and that abandonment made him a man who attaches to nobody. As an adult he serves as a motorcycle courier in the Austrian army and is sent to occupied France, where he finds a fox cub that has lost its mother and starts carrying it with him. The film keeps the war in the background and looks mainly at the question of care: a man nobody looked after trying to feed an animal. It runs two periods in parallel and the childhood sections are its strongest. The tone is measured and does not exploit its feeling. Who it's for: viewers who like wartime drama and quiet storytelling. Who it's not for: anyone expecting action; the film shows almost no combat.