Cinema has taken viewers to the trenches of World War I so often that audiences might as well have formed sensory memories of a throat-clenching terror, the screams drowned by a sudden explosion and ears ringing. It’s all artificial, of course, but film’s empathy machine is perfectly suited for such participatory experiences from the safety of our seats. Yet war, like love, has too many faces and facets to ever be extensively represented. Luckily for us, Flemish director Lukas Dhont has chosen exactly that setting for his third feature (after Girl and Close) and first love story. Coward is one of those provocative titles called into question by everyone but the film’s protagonist. In the Belgian army (on the French side), Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) and his mates take pleasure in naming others cowards, be it enemies or deserters, summarizing a hero/weakling binary from the get-go.
We experience Coward in close proximity to Pierre, but only sometimes through his point of view; in fact it takes a long time before we hear him speak. Despite that, the shaky handheld camera of Dhont’s usual cinematographer Frank van den Eeden keeps close to Pierre, framing him in medium close-up with the negative space of skies––the purest part of the world right now, it seems. The film is structured around longer narrative episodes where Pierre meets the troupe of soldiers whose job is to entertain––the so-called rejects put on vaudeville plays that Francis (Valentin Campagne) directs. To Pierre, he is forward in an arresting way that counters the former’s taciturn, solemn presence. Francis, on the other hand, is the kind of character who’s made an armor from his artistic quirkiness—or rather a cloak to pull over the queer identity he could never allow to be seen.
In the trenches, it’s impossible to exist as both gay and individual. Everyone is replaceable. There is always another strong male body to carry the load, and assimilation into the obedient collective is a guarantee for discipline. Dhont, though, plays it up a notch by including many scenes of singing and chanting, in addition to the daily frontline tasks the men perform together, outlining a connection—however ephemeral one can be on the battlefield—in which to nest the love story. Coward is honest about the taxing, almost unbearable reality of the men’s psychological states without using soldiers’ depression, nervous breakdowns, or suicides as a narrative device. Instead they are a normalized occurrence affecting each and every one in the squad. This chilling normality is far from sanitized––van den Eeden’s camera is very careful to rack focus when dead bodies are in sight, but only at first. The more we dive into Coward’s subjective narration, the more a background comes into focus, as if Pierre only now begins to comprehend the gravity of loss, or only allows himself to do so later on.
In what feels like a parallel world, Francis—the son of a tailor—prepares the nightly entertainment, putting on a big show: stage, decórs, costumes, and all to soldiers and higher-ups. Every subsequent performance sees more sophisticated costumes, from stitched-up shirts to bedazzled dresses and tulle, and more elaborate plot. Francis, who inevitably plays the lead female character, experiments with a decorative femininity and beautiful drag, the refinement of which is matched only by his acting. Dhont and co. have once again found incredible newcomers; both Campagne and Macchia lead the film like a waltz we’ve waited so long to cheer on.
Coward sees Dhont adapting to period filmmaking while maintaining what he does best as a writer-director: slice open the emotional enclosure in which his characters try to hide. In a chronotope such as a WWI frontline, the codes of masculinity are, naturally, more intensely enforced, but Dhont—whose work carves space for queerness in the strictest heteronormative spheres—shows us that precisely this intensity can allow characters more freedom. Instead of simply placing the protagonists’ gay relationship in contrast with the heteronormative reality, the script, in a way, downplays such conflict. By blurring boundaries between the worlds of restrictions and freedom, Coward suggests that our concept of masculinity is frail, even when ossified.
Coward premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by MUBI.