The Fence

The absorbing new drama from Claire Denis (Beau Travail, NYFF37) is centered around a fascinating, intractable tête-à-tête. On a white-run construction site in an acrid, dust-strewn town in West Africa, a local man named Albouny (the riveting Denis regular Isaach De Bankolé) has arrived to demand the immediate return of the dead body of his brother Nouofia, killed in a mysterious work accident. The site’s anxious foreman, Horn (Matt Dillon), protected behind the perimeter fence, yet ruffled by Albouny’s defiance and unflappability, is clearly hiding a terrible truth from the man. Set primarily over the course of one unrelenting night, Denis’s film, based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, also drifts on the neurotic vibrations of Horn’s alienated younger wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce), just arrived from London, and his live-wire right-hand man (Tom Blyth), to whom Horn owes a secret debt. All these simmering tensions converge in Denis’s unpredictable and intimate film, with which the French director returns to the subjects of colonialism and racial segregation so central to her unparalleled filmography.