‘Coward’ review: Two Belgian soldiers are drawn together amid the horrors of war in Lukas Dhont’s intimate queer drama

Dir: Lukas Dhont. Belgium/France/Netherlands. 2026. 125mins

Ordinarily, war films capture the brutality and insanity of combat, but Lukas Dhont’s third feature locates something far more rare: the tenderness. Set against the backdrop of the First World War along the Belgian front line, Coward is a love story about two soldiers who discover a connection they fear they will never experience away from the battlefield. Exhibiting an emotional restraint sometimes missing from his previous films Girl (2018) and Close (2022), Dhont’s latest proves to be an affecting, familiar drama.

The two leads exude such a vulnerable, genuine rapport that it offsets the script’s potential predictability

The Belgian filmmaker returns to the Cannes competition after Close took home the Grand Prix in 2022 before being nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar. (Girl also debuted at Cannes, in Un Certain Regard). Dhont has fashioned this queer romance around a novel premise, lifting the veil on the little-known drag theatre performances that took place during the war. That unique milieu will help distinguish the picture, but it’s the chemistry between newcomers Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne that should sell the film to international audiences. Mubi have aquired key territories including UK/Ireland, while Lumiere will distribute in Benelux and Diaphana Distribution in France.

Nicknamed Quiet Mouse by his fellow soldiers, the closeted Pierre (Macchia) is soft-spoken but capable, whether he’s hauling munitions or dead bodies. He becomes enchanted by Francis (Campagne), who is the star of the regiment’s amateur theatre troupe, which casts the male soldiers to portray both the male and female roles. Despite Francis’ unapologetically camp nature on stage, he’s beloved by the rest of the troops, who are seemingly aware that he is gay. Pierre and Francis soon develop a strong romantic attraction, engaging in a clandestine affair in between performances.

Much like with Close, Dhont zooms in on the intimate bond between two males, albeit on a much grander canvas. But although Coward features a few battle scenes, his frequent cinematographer Frank van den Eeden de-emphasises their scope and scale in order to make the sequences feel atmospheric and authentic rather than sweeping or thrilling. With faint nods to Beau Travail, the film observes the beauty of these young male bodies in motion, the soldiers’ masculinity noticeably gentle and hesitant instead of menacing.

Coward’s unexpectedly compassionate depiction of male-bonding rituals is echoed in the scenes concerning the Francis-led theatre performances. Flamboyantly portraying female characters, alongside several fellow soldiers, Francis is never mocked or harassed. Just as remarkably, he and his castmates’ gender-bending stage characters are celebrated for their creativity by appreciative male audiences — a reaction that probably runs counter to most viewers’ assumption about how such outrageousness would have been perceived during that era. (The shows are such a hit, in fact, that the commanding officers request that Francis’ troupe tour the front line to boost morale.) But there’s a bitter irony undercutting this seeming open-mindedness among the Belgian military: Pierre and Francis must keep their homosexuality private lest they be persecuted.

The film follows the expected narrative beats of the repressed love story, although the two leads exude such a vulnerable, genuine rapport that it offsets the script’s potential predictability. Initially flirty but tentative, Pierre and Francis eventually ravish one another, resulting in an erotic sex scene that conveys not just their lust but also the pent-up desire these gay men have had to keep hidden. If Coward can sometimes feel a bit too tasteful and muted — perhaps as a course correction from Dhont after the occasional melodramatic, manipulative flourishes of his earlier films — the picture’s carnal interludes help raise the temperature.

Making his big-screen debut, Macchia is touching as the shy, romantically inexperienced Pierre, who is understandably seduced by Campagne’s charming Francis. In their lives before the war, Pierre was a farmer while Francis worked as a tailor, and those divergent jobs suggest something about their contrasting personalities — one man introspective, the other flashy and outgoing — that play into their combustible dynamic.

Near the start of Coward, a soldier laments that this war will never end but, in the film’s later stretches, Francis expresses a different anxiety: that the fighting will, in fact, eventually come to a close, forcing him back into the ’traditional’ way of life that suffocates him. Dhont finds the drama in this dilemma, presenting a more nuanced portrait of the men who fought in the Great War while acknowledging the homophobia that raged on beyond the barracks. Pierre and Francis face death while fighting for their country, but combat is also the only place where they can truly live.