The Fence”: the colonial echo behind the fence.

Claire Denis never films from a place of comfort. From Chocolat (1988) to Beau Travail (1999) and White Material (2009), her cinema has returned again and again to West Africa —the land where she grew up, and the wound that never heals— to speak about power, memory and inequality. With The Fence, an adaptation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Combat de nègre et de chiens, Denis builds once again a seemingly minimal setting —a fence, a construction site, four characters— that contains an entire continent of historical and ethical tensions.

The story unfolds like a long night under siege. Horn (Matt Dillon), an American foreman working on a public-works project, welcomes his young wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) while sharing quarters with Cal (Tom Blyth), a volatile and arrogant British engineer. The sudden appearance of Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), a villager demanding the body of his brother who died on the site, ignites the confrontation: the metal fence surrounding the camp becomes both a physical and symbolic border, a brutal reminder of who commands and who endures. Denis traps her characters inside that tension, letting words, silences and glances become weapons.

The screenplay, co-written by Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon and Andrew Litvack, preserves the theatrical pulse of Koltès: harsh dialogue, verbal clashes, repetitions that emphasize the impossibility of agreement. At times it can feel rigid, but that rigidity is intentional —these characters speak as carriers of discourse more than as free individuals. Horn embodies the exploiter who refuses responsibility; Cal represents colonial violence transmuted into contemporary hysteria; Leonie is the fragile witness, caught between desire and fear; and Alboury stands as unyielding dignity, the voice of the dead no one wants to hear.

The performances hold the film together. Matt Dillon gives Horn a rough weariness, the exhaustion of a man who paints himself as a victim while sustaining a system of abuse. Tom Blyth infuses Cal with dangerous energy —arrogant at first, unraveling as hidden truths emerge. Mia McKenna-Bruce brings humanity to Leonie, even when the script reduces her to a spectator, and manages to give truth to lines that could have sounded mannered. Yet it is Isaach de Bankolé who elevates the entire work: with his steady gaze and upright stance, he embodies collective memory, the demand that refuses to be silenced. His silences weigh more than any speech.

Eric Gautier’s cinematography wraps the story in dense shadows and feverish light. The interiors of the containers glow with artificial neon, like improvised prisons; the exteriors are dominated by floodlights and the implacable silhouette of the fence. Close-ups capture sweat, tension, and despair; withered flowers and dusty ground remind us that life persists even amid violence. It’s a gaze that transforms space into metaphor, as Denis once did with the desert in Beau Travail.

The props underline precariousness and imbalance: construction helmets, muddy boots, improvised weapons, Leonie’s absurd high heels that seem like caricature yet reveal her disconnection from her surroundings. Every object becomes a reminder of who belongs and who doesn’t, who works and who observes.

Music by Tindersticks —Denis’s longtime collaborators— adds an elegiac tone: taut strings, sustained notes, melodies that hover like an omen. It serves as a poetic counterpoint to the harshness of the action, a thread that turns violence into elegy and waiting into Greek tragedy.

The Fence converses with much of Denis’s filmography: the colonial clash of Chocolat, the physicality of Beau Travail, the despair of White Material. It also resonates with films about moral confinement —from In the Penal Colony to echoes of A Prophet. The difference is that here everything is reduced to a minimum space: a fence as a line of combat, an absent body as the center of the dispute, an endless night symbolizing centuries of imbalance.

What Claire Denis seeks to convey is clear: colonialism is not past, it is present; structural violence does not disappear, it mutates into bureaucracy, negligence, and the arrogance of believing you own a land that was never yours. The fence not only separates the camp from the village —it separates those who exercise power from those who suffer it. Through his demand, Alboury exposes that lie: without recognition of the dead, there will never be peace for the living.

Ultimately, The Fence is a hard, uneven but necessary film. A drama oscillating between theatre and cinema, that unsettles more than it moves, yet fulfills the essential purpose of Denis’s work: to remind us that the colonial story cannot be archived, that its echo still resounds every time a fence divides those who rule from those who seek justice. It’s uncomfortable, poetic, and fierce cinema —transforming a single night into a metaphor for centuries, and an invisible corpse into the true protagonist: the absent body that demands remembrance.

Xavier Garzarain

El apartamento de Billy