Year of the Fox (2023)

Ivy Reid (Sarah Jeffery) is your typical young adult, poised to find her way in the world. However, when the parents that adopted her go through a divorce, she feels like she’s being pulled in two opposite directions, struggling to survive the pressure that comes with her parents’ drama. Year of the Fox is Ivy’s story as she navigates new territory, as she deals with the trials and tribulations of what millions of people deal with every year. Life just hit her in the face, how will she respond?

In a lot of ways Year of the Fox is your standard teenage drama in which a young adult/teenager finds themselves facing the struggles of reality–forced to find their way in the world while constantly enduring a series of hurdles and setbacks. That’s, for all intents and purposes, what you’ll find in this film. However, it extends itself a bit further, reaching into a bucket full of slightly more adult themes that allows the film to touch more mature audiences in ways that those aforementioned teenage dramas aren’t always capable of. Year of the Fox does a good job of finding a series of places in cinema and combining them to create something that will appeal to a wide-ranging audience, creating the potential for the film to become mainstream and uber-successful.

Emotion obviously plays a major role in any drama, often being the driving force behind either the film’s success or failure; and while Year of the Fox does find itself delivering dramatic moments time and time again, there is one hiccup present in this aspect of the film. There are too many empty emotional moments, times throughout the course of Year of the Fox that steal from any previously established emotional prominence. After the drama is established in a particular scene, an additional line of dialogue or an inappropriate look from one of the characters extends the scene just a second or two too long. In those moments the drama that had been so wonderfully created is deflated, and drama as a whole sometimes struggles to keep its head above water.

By the end of the film the characters have run their course, and they stop appealing to viewers (at least most of them). I feel that Ivy manages to stay afloat, she manages to continue to appeal to viewers in a number of ways by Year of the Fox’s conclusion. While the others fall by the wayside, and while the others effectively lose their luster by the end of the film, Ivy holds steady–she continues to be true to herself in a way that is refreshing and entertaining. In a lot of ways it seems that everything that occurs in Year of the Fox is happening to Ivy rather than her being the catalyst for the series of events throughout the course of the film. I appreciate that, because there are times when we wonder why things are happening to us–and Ivy is a reflection of that. By the end nothing else matters, only Ivy, and that’s the only thing that needs to matter.

Year of the Fox is a teenage drama that extends itself to far more mature audiences, to places where everyone looks at the film and goes “I understand.” There are a series of down moments, and I’m not sure that outside of Ivy there are characters that really appeal to viewers by the end of the film. I really do enjoy this film, but I enjoy it because of how Ivy is written and how that character is able to develop–the rest of the film isn’t important to me (and that’s pretty disappointing). With that being said, however, I believe that the mature content of Year of the Fox and Ivy’s development throughout the course of the film will appeal to many and the film will ultimately be effective as a result.

Directed by Megan Griffiths.

Written by Eliza Flug.

Starring Sarah Jerffery, Jane Adams, Jake Weber, Balthazar Getty, Lexi Simonsen, etc.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐½/10