As Bubi (Amerul Affendi), the dispassionate and dismally successful hustler of small scams, re-marries, he abandons his two sons, Ali (Idan Aedan) and Amir (Hadi Putra), to the care of Lonny (Chew Kin Wah), the owner of a shady fishing business. Ali and Amir, fraternally twinned and more or less secluded from all unnecessary social interaction, earn their keep setting fish to dry and attend school in a sleepy coastal Malaysian town. While Ali speaks normally, Amir barely communicates — when he does, it’s almost exclusively using the names of animals, each possibly signifying a particular idea, wish, or command. But in contrast with his classmates, Amir reads voraciously, possessing (according to his brother) some gifted element that allows him to win each time at the little games they play. It is unsurprising, then, that their new English teacher, the young Lara (Dian Sastrowardoyo), takes a liking to him more than Ali — or anyone else, for that matter.
This liking, as well as the fondness the boys nurse for each other, inflects much of Woo Ming Jin’s latest film, The Fox King, with a preternatural touch of subjectivity. A co-production between Malaysia and Indonesia, the film delights in its rough-hewn textures, blending realism and sensual memory in a coming-of-age framework that’s advantaged by an equatorial, perpetual summer. Save for this fact, however, much of The Fox King remains a muddled, half-baked mess. It ebbs and flows inconsistently between narrative points that receive little redress and ones that do; though Lonny, along with the boys’ friends and occasional bullies, maintains a straightforward presence throughout, Lara’s is more mercurial. As much as this may speak to the hazy, hormonal vagaries of teenage recollection, Woo doesn’t quite earn the comparison when he pursues about a dozen separate subplots, many of which advance a certain thematic aspect while further shrouding the young woman in unreadable mystery. Though young, she has worldly, cosmopolitan dreams; while kind to Amir, she flirts with disaster in her coolly unprofessional conduct in the classroom.
A more fascinating work might foreground Lara, rather than the twins, as a linchpin for the film’s psychological undercurrents, but The Fox King, to its credit, mines most of its emotional beats from Ali and Amir’s relationship. Jealousy, helplessness, and brotherly concern rear their heads, somewhat inchoately, from this premise as the hot-tempered Ali bears the bulk of onscreen burden in reconciling with troubles aplenty: his boss runs a tightly unethical ship, his brother frequently runs off with Lara, and his father selfishly flits in and out of their lives. The film’s focus on one brother over the other diverges from the fetishizing tendencies of a work like Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins, but both films lamentably squander the enigma of their central protagonists on routine and desultory sequences. The oneiric atmosphere besieging Ali’s impressions of Lara, likewise, hovers above flimsy ground, its material tensions scattershot and cloyingly melodramatic. Like the durian species — illegally harvested by Bubi’s sons for him — after which it is named, The Fox King bears a strong scent, but little bite.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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