by Hudson Moura
Lukas Dhont’s Coward is a deeply intimate war film that deliberately refuses the grand perspective of official history. Rather than depicting the First World War through battles, strategies, or national narratives, it focuses on a close-up story: the emotional lives of two soldiers, Pierre (played by Emmanuel Macchia) and Francis (played by Valentin Campagne), whose relationship unfolds within the strange spaces created by war. Pierre experiences the front directly, surrounded by death, wounded bodies, fear, and the trauma of losing fellow soldiers. Francis belongs to another world within the military structure, leading a group of men who can no longer fight and instead perform for the troops. From the beginning, the film is less interested in the war as historical spectacle than in the private experiences that official histories often leave behind.
The title becomes one of the film’s richest ideas. “Coward” is repeatedly used as an accusation, whether against enemies, deserters, or men who want to escape the front, but Dhont gradually complicates the meaning of the word. In the context of Pierre and Francis’s attraction, cowardice can also become connected to survival: the survival of love, desire, and a way of life that had almost no legitimate place in the world surrounding them. The war creates an extraordinary contradiction. It is both a prison and, paradoxically, one of the few spaces in which these men can encounter one another outside the structures that would otherwise separate them.
Visually, Dhont keeps the camera remarkably close to the characters, especially Pierre. The frequent close-ups and mobile framing create the sensation of moving with the soldiers rather than observing them from a distance. This proximity intensifies everything: fear, desire, grief, exhaustion, attraction. The film often feels less like a conventional war movie than a film about the backstage of war, concentrating on camps, temporary shelters, performances, conversations, and glances rather than constantly returning to trenches and combat. That choice gives Coward a distinctive emotional scale.
One of the film’s strongest elements is the group of performers led by Francis. These “rejected” soldiers, unable to return to combat, become responsible for entertaining those still fighting. Their songs, dances, sketches, theatrical performances, and frequent impersonations of women create some of the film’s funniest and most touching moments. Yet the performances are not treated merely as diversion. Francis insists that their purpose is to bring joy, sweetness, and relief to men surrounded by death. More importantly, he associates art with freedom. In this context, theatre becomes more than escapism: it becomes a temporary space in which identities can shift, gender roles can loosen, and soldiers can imagine another reality.
The idea has a remarkable historical foundation: Dhont was inspired by a 1914 photograph of a Belgian soldier behind the front dressed as a woman, which led him to discover archival evidence of theatrical revues created by soldiers during wartime. The performances therefore become more than an imaginative invention of the film; they recover a largely forgotten space in which art, camaraderie, gender play, and freedom could briefly emerge within the machinery of war.
That idea gives the film a surprisingly powerful reflection on art itself. In a world organized around violence, discipline, masculinity, and obedience, performance allows something softer and more fluid to emerge. The entertainers do not simply help the soldiers forget the war; they create a brief alternative to it. Their work suggests that imagination can be a form of resistance, and that art can preserve aspects of humanity that war attempts to erase.
At the centre of all this is the intense attraction between Pierre and Francis. Dhont develops their relationship primarily through proximity, gestures, and gaze rather than through explicit explanation. Much of the emotional force comes from what the two men see in one another and what they cannot safely articulate. Their desire therefore exists within a constant tension between possibility and danger. The war brings them together, but the social world around them makes that intimacy almost impossible.
This is why Coward works so effectively as both a war film and a love story. It is not interested in presenting homosexuality as a separate issue added to a historical conflict. Instead, sexuality, masculinity, fear, loyalty, and survival are inseparable from the experience of war itself. The same environment that threatens their lives also creates unusual spaces of intimacy, performance, and emotional freedom.
The film is extraordinarily moving because it rarely gives the viewer emotional distance. The camera remains close to the characters, and the performances are remarkably strong: Emmanuel Macchia as Pierre and Valentin Campagne as Francis, who jointly received the Best Actor award at Cannes 2026, anchor the film with an intense and affecting chemistry. Around them, the story moves through a continuous series of emotional shifts—fear, tenderness, humour, desire, grief, and brief moments of freedom. The ensemble surrounding Pierre and Francis is especially effective, giving the world of the camp an intensity that often feels like a film within the film.
Dhont ultimately overturns the conventional opposition between cowardice and heroism. In a system that defines courage as remaining available for violence, choosing life, love, and the possibility of another future becomes a political act in itself.
Coward transforms a familiar word into a much more complicated moral question. What does it mean to be courageous when survival itself can be condemned as weakness? And what does courage mean for people whose love must remain hidden? Dhont avoids turning these questions into slogans. Instead, he builds them through bodies, glances, performances, and the fragile spaces where affection can exist amid violence. The result is a profoundly touching film about love, art, and the forms of freedom people create even in situations designed to destroy them.
Rating: 4.5/5