Fauve is a 2018 short film (16 minutes) from Canada, directed by Jeremy Comte.
The film is from Quebec and thus is in French. Two boys that look like they're about 12, Benjamin and Tyler, are out playing in a rural area. While they are obviously best friends, their play is the kind of dumb aggressive things that 12-year-old boys do together: they chuck rocks at each other, try to scare each other, fake each other out by pretending to be injured. After goofing around in an abandoned train car, they climb under an old fence and sneak into an abandoned open-pit mine. Then things suddenly get very serious.
Tropes:
- Abandoned Area: The train where the boys are playing at the start of the film.
- Abandoned Mine: It looks like it might be asbestos. It isn't quite abandoned, as a single truck is shown tooling through the place, but clearly active mining is no longer going on. Before going down into the pit the boys enter the abandoned office headquarters.
- Call-Back: Early in the film Benjamin sees a fox—he tells Tyler to turn around but Tyler thinks it's a trick and refuses, much to Benjamin's frustration. At the end, when a shell-shocked Tyler is riding home with the woman, he sees the fox in a field.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Benjamin sinks into wet, sucking asbestos and drowns alone and terrified.
- Death of a Child: Benjamin dies, sucked down into the muck of the mine pit when Tyler pushes him too far into the quagmire and can't reach him to pull him back out.
- Dutch Angle: The first sign that something bad is going to happen to these two kids is the first shot of the movie, pointing down the silent, empty train car, titled from the vertical.
- Free-Range Children: Two kids roaming around a mine unescorted, leading to tragedy.
- Gratuitous English: Quebecois swear words don't seem to pack enough punch, as the boys say "Fuck you" to each other in English.
- He Who Must Not Be Seen: Whoever was driving the truck. The truck scares the bejesus out of the boys when it barrels through the mine, but the boys never see the driver. When a frantic Tyler goes looking for help, he finds the truck, but the driver is nowhere around.
- Minimalist Cast: Three speaking parts—the two boys, and the unnamed matronly woman who gives Tyler a ride at the end of the film.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The entire second half of the short is devoted to this.
- Quicksand Sucks: Yes it does, when the boys find to their terror that the powdery material at the bottom of the pit, turned into thick mud by standing water pooled at the bottom, can suck people in.
- Thousand-Yard Stare: A traumatized Tyler can't even talk when the woman in the car picks him up at the end of the film.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: The boys' game involves throwing rocks at each other, pouring containers of mystery liquid onto each other's heads, and a robust amount of cursing and insults. They're clearly having a blast and care a great deal about one other.
