Is the idea of a Claire Denis film changing? There was likely an image one formed in their head when that name emerged: elliptical, sexy, avant-garde. Yet recent works are suggesting a different direction, one far more direct and less mysterious. It can even be said that her newest, The Fence, plays like a final film––not necessarily as a grand summation or statement, but like a stripping-down of almost everything possible. The film, one can say, comes to be just about the politics––or perhaps if you asked Denis, a known fan of the wordy Jean Eustache, character and dialogue––instead of capital m-e-s mise-en-scène. Being based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, its stagey origins serve it to both effective and detrimental ends, and also point to someone just wanting to knock out an adaptation of something they liked rather quickly.
Beginning with the blunt title card “A construction site in West Africa” (almost like something out of a Hollywood action film), The Fence drops us right in the middle of a colonial dynamic familiar since the beginning of Denis’ filmography. Horn (Matt Dillon) is the foreman on said site, trying to just get his job done in the middle of what appears to be a Chinese takeover. One night, though, Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé) shows up on the other side of the fence guarding the workers’ home; the stoic, older African man, dressed much nicer than the boorish Horn––Saint Laurent did the clothes, after all––demands to retrieve the body of his dead brother, who worked construction there. Horn is protective of his job and status, wanting to both maintain the loyalty of his new, 30-year-younger wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and keep the worker who was responsible for the death, Cal (Tom Blyth), out of hot water, with the reasons for both intersecting in ways we’ll find out later.
Much of the film’s drama is simple, handheld shot-reverse from both sides of the fence, Dillon effectively playing a dumb (and still condescending) man who’s bad at pretending he doesn’t know more, while Denis favorite de Bankolé––in probably his biggest role since The Limits of Control––lends his characteristically commanding presence to what’s essentially a specter. The Fence, frankly, is about as straightforward as that sounds, though one early instance of what seems an AI-generated shot for a dream sequence makes one think there’s going to be a whole new terrain of images that are never delivered.
Most of this film is pin-drop quiet; you hear a lot of crickets chirping, but none of the expected Tindersticks score. At one point Leonie mentions to Horn the impending sense of doom that’s always hung over her life, and an accumulating feeling of something not-quite-right in the air does effectively puncture a low-key register. One nevertheless wishes the escalation could play a little higher, or just a bit more surprising. But I suppose this is why The Fence evokes a final film: it’s a stare into the darkness of now that simply sees nothing left.
The Fence premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.