Every so often a film turns up with a pitch so peculiar you have to read it twice to check you haven’t nodded off over a Ladybird edition of Aesop. The Fox is one of those. Jai Courtney plays Nick, the amiable heir to a wealthy rural landowner. He finds out that his fiancée Kori (Emily Browning) has been playing away. One night he traps a rogue fox, voiced by Olivia Colman. The fox would rather not end up as a stole, so she offers a trade. If Nick lets her live, she’ll fix his relationship. All he has to do is push Kori into a magic hole in the ground that will turn her into the perfect partner.
Readers who know their folklore will hear alarm bells there. Bargains with talking animals always come with small print, and foxes write the worst small print of all. Look at the record: Reynard the trickster, Brer Fox, and the chap who offered the Gingerbread Man a lift across the river. More recently there’s the syringe-fingered Crack Fox of The Mighty Boosh, lurking in the bins of east London, and the fox in David Lowery’s Arthurian The Green Knight, which trots alongside Dev Patel’s Gawain and briefly speaks up to tell him to turn back. Colman’s fox is neither, though both would have given Nick better advice. Nobody in that tradition has ever come out of a fox deal better off, apart from the fox. Wrap the bargain around a magic hole that promises the “perfect” spouse and you have The Stepford Wives with a brush tail. Courtney’s character apparently didn’t get the memo.
Casting Colman is the masterstroke. She has played a queen twice, so playing a Faustian bin-raider is hardly a stretch. Hearing that very British national treasure purr temptations across the Australian scrub is worth the ticket on its own. Sam Neill voices a magpie, which seems only fair for a man with Jurassic form. We believe this is his final film role, which gives his feathered turn a bittersweet edge. Somewhere in Oz heaven, the angels are laughing. The live-action cast includes Damon Herriman, Claudia Doumit, Zlatko Burić, Miranda Otto and Kim Gyngell, a solid line-up of faces you know from somewhere.
The pedigree behind the camera is the interesting part. This is the feature debut of Adelaide’s Dario Russo, who made the early YouTube oddity Italian Spiderman and co-created Danger 5, the gloriously deranged 1960s spy parody. On The Fox he wrote, directed, edited and scored the film himself, so it’s a one-man band with a taxidermy budget. It was produced by Causeway Films, the outfit behind The Babadook and Talk To Me. This is the company’s first comedy, so expect jokes that have spent time in a dark cellar.
The film premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2025. It then won the Audience Award for Best Australian Feature at the 2026 Sydney Film Festival and played in the Panorama section at Sitges. Early critics mostly liked it but don’t entirely agree: 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from eleven reviews, and a more guarded 60 on Metacritic from five. That’s about right for a satire whose central relationship advice is “dig a hole”.
This new trailer comes from Aura Entertainment, which opens the film in US cinemas on 4 December 2026. Madman is handling the Australian release. There’s no British date yet, which seems a shame given that the film’s star attraction is ours.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll stick to one observation. In every story about a magic hole and a made-to-order spouse, the hole wins. We just hope somebody in the cast has read The Monkey’s Paw.
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