Coward tickets

Big Nights—Closing Night Film

In the trenches of the First World War, a young soldier finds an unexpected connection with a man determined to lift his comrades' spirits through theatre. An award-winner at Cannes, this film makes the case that in a world full of violence, love is the most radical act of all.

Even the manifold mudbaths and bloodbaths of the Western Front can’t do much to dirty up Lukas Dhont‘s exactingly exquisite filmmaking in Coward, the young Belgian director’s third feature, and his first to extend his recurring interest in challenged LGBTQ identity to a historical context.

Observing the burgeoning romance between two Belgian soldiers — one outwardly masculine but harbouring a secret, the other testing the norms of gender presentation in the aggressively patriarchal military — fighting the First World War, the new film is clearly of a piece with Dhont’s previous works, 2018’s controversial trans youth portrait Girl and 2022’s heartbroken childhood tragedy Close, in its intimate foregrounding of vulnerable queer characters and the quivery sensory specificity with which it portrays them.

Coward centres the tension between the severe terrors of warfare and the silent, interior anxiety of the male outsider afraid of being found out, countered with the bracing, buoying rush of first love, however inconveniently timed and placed.

Dhont has a tactile, compassionate sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men. Coward, by turns breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual, thrives on that understanding, encouraging audiences to share in its pleasure. – Guy Lodge, Variety

“A heartfelt examination of cowardice and lives lived in secret amid the brutality of battle.”—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Gracefully finding love in the most hopeless of places, the Belgian director's third feature finds fertile new ground for his interest in imperiled queer identity and masculinity in crisis.”—Guy Lodge, Variety