‘The Fence’ review: Isaach de Bankolé roots Claire Denis’ atmospheric West Africa thriller

Dir: Claire Denis. France. 2025. 107mins

A building website in West Africa performs host to a protracted darkish evening of the soul within the newest drama from Claire Denis, which turns French author Bernad-Marie Koltes’ 1979 play Black Battles With Canines into an atmospheric if uneven noir-tinged thriller. Primarily a four-handed chamber piece of kinds, this adaptation offers with powder-keg themes of the colonial psyche, racial tensions and retribution, however finally proves too stilted and stagey to pack a lot of a punch.

De Bankolé offers the movie’s lynchpin efficiency

However, The Fence follows within the Denis custom of enigmatic research of people in disaster, and the inexorable relationship between the bodily and the ideological. The director’s followers ought to hunt down her third English language movie – after Excessive Life (2018) and Stars At Midday (2002) – because it performs San Sebastian then New York and London within the wake of its Toronto premiere; an arthouse launch may additionally observe.

The Fence sees Denis returning to colonial French Africa, the place she was raised and which she has explored in earlier movies together with her 1988 debut Chocolat, Beau Travail (1999) and White Materials (2009). Whereas not as sharply-drawn as these works, her newest does share key similarities. Chocolat star and common Denis collaborator Isaach de Bankolé performs a central function right here, and it recollects White Materials’s central conceit of foolhardy Occidental characters standing their floor in land which isn’t theirs to defend.

Right here, that falls to building website employee Horn who, in a change from Koltes’ unique French character, is an American performed with a lived-in weariness by Matt Dillon. Horn and his largely African workforce construct roads and infrastructure imagined to carry prosperity to the area. This evening, nevertheless, Horn is getting ready for the arrival from London of his new spouse Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), however celebrations are jeopardised by native villager Alboury (de Bankolé), who is set to gather the physique of his brother who was killed, supposedly, in an on-site accident. With Horn’s highly-strung British colleague Cal (Tom Blyth) rising more and more agitated, and Alboury refusing to depart, tensions slowly construct.

The movie’s title most clearly refers back to the large metallic fence which separates the positioning from the encompassing panorama, by which Horn and Alboury have an ongoing dialog – largely concerning the whereabouts of the physique, however with occasional non-sequiturs about marriage and ladies, religion and duty. A lot of this dialogue is clunky and blunt-edged, and the actors wrestle to plough their manner by it.

Cinematography, from Eric Gautier, is extra naturally expressive, capturing the shadows that play throughout the boys’s faces, the looming shapes of the guard towers, the sickly unnatural mild contained in the storage container bunks. Shut ups of wilting flowers within the floor give a pop of fading color, and tackle a melancholy that means because the story progresses.

When Leonie arrives, the dynamic adjustments. Without having a lot company past what her presence may imply for the assembled males, How To Have Intercourse breakout star McKenna-Bruce lends the character a susceptible innocence; a witness to her husband attempting to plead, intimidate and bribe his manner out of a scenario he has clearly been in earlier than. She additionally fares nicely with the dialogue, bringing an genuine register to strains like “I really feel like a tiny grain of sand.” But, whereas having her totter across the dusty website in stiletto sneakers and, later, a silky crimson camisole could underscore her fish-out-of-water qualities – or the potential conflict of want and violence she may incite – such moments really feel like dated dramatic shorthand.

The fence is, in fact, additionally consultant of the cultural and emotional obstacles at play: between Horn and Alboury, between Leonie and this alien setting, between Cal and a horrible reality he’s unwilling to acknowledge. As Cal, Blyth positively fizzes with swaggering machismo, which steadily begins to curdle as these buried truths begin to floor. Whereas artistic selections are fairly on the nostril – early on, Cal listens to Midnight Oil’s protest music ‘Beds Are Burning’ and later has a bathe which runs black with filth – Blyth retains a good grip on his character.

Regardless of being hamstrung by that ripped-off-the-page dialogue, Dillon is stable because the more and more determined Horn, unwilling to take any duty for what has transpired and portray himself as a sufferer. However he finds himself coming undone beneath the unwavering gaze of Alboury, who stays inflexible and resolute on the opposite facet of the fence. De Bankolé offers the movie’s lynchpin efficiency, his clear eyes and measured expression saying extra about this enduring imbalance of energy than phrases ever may.