Coward: a beautiful, unconventional First World War love story

Coward: a beautiful, unconventional First World War love story that challenges our understanding of courage

There is something rather special about discovering a film that lingers long after you’ve left the cinema. Lukas Dhont’s Coward is one such film. As part of this year’s CineCity Brighton Film Festival, it is another outstanding selection in a programme that has so far delivered some genuinely exceptional cinema.

I watched this the eve before Armistice Day (11th November), and this Belgian director’s unconventional First World War drama feels particularly resonant. Set on the Belgian Western Front in 1916, it offers a perspective on the conflict far from the familiar imagery of battlefields, military strategy, and heroic sacrifice. Instead, Dhont turns his attention to the young men caught up in the machinery of war, their relationships with one another and the extraordinary ways they find to retain some humanity amid the brutality.

The film opens with a trainload of young Belgian recruits heading towards the front. There is an almost adolescent excitement about their journey; they are babies almost, with peach fuzz on their faces, and a wide-eyed wonder at their expanding horizons. They sing, joke and jostle together, full of bravado and anticipation. Among them is Pierre, played by Emmanuel Macchia in a stunning acting debut, a quiet farm boy who speaks seldom but, when he does, speaks well.

That youthful enthusiasm is brutally short-lived. The realities of the Western Front are quickly impressed upon the newcomers. Their duties involve rescuing wounded soldiers from No Man’s Land, dealing with the dead, moving compatriots into mass graves and feeding German prisoners of war. The horror of conflict is never far away, but remarkably, there is relatively little conventional fighting shown on screen. Much of the violence takes place beyond the immediate action, leaving room for Dhont to explore what happens between the battles.

It is behind the front lines that the film finds its most distinctive voice. Pierre becomes involved with a group of soldiers known as The Rejects, who organise theatrical performances to entertain their comrades and lift morale. It is not clear if they are conscientious objectors or simply too “artistic” to serve on the front line. Led by the charismatic Francis, played by actor Valentin Campagne, the group creates costumes, paints scenery and constructs elaborate props for their makeshift productions.

Francis is a tailor by trade and brings a natural flair for costume and theatrical invention to the group. This flair extends to his sexuality. Under his direction, the soldiers create elaborate scenes featuring cross-dressing performers, often playing the roles of wives and mothers. These performances offer another fascinating perspective on life at the front, providing entertainment and emotional release for men whose everyday existence is otherwise defined by fear, mud and death.

The performances, featuring songs and theatrical tableaux, provide a welcome escape for soldiers who have witnessed unimaginable horrors. The emotional response of their audiences is striking. For a brief time, the theatre offers something that the war has almost entirely taken away: joy. These are young men, finding an outlet for their creativity in circumstances that offer precious little freedom. Their theatrical world is a fascinating contrast to the military environment surrounding them, where traditional expectations of masculinity, courage and duty are relentlessly enforced.

It is through these performances and the troupe’s travels along the front that Pierre and Francis grow closer. A tender love story gradually emerges, adding another layer to a film already exploring male friendship, identity, duty and the psychological consequences of war. Macchia’s understated performance captures Pierre’s initial shyness and uncertainty, while Campagne brings an infectious energy, expressive face, confidence and considerable nuance to Francis. Their chemistry is compelling, and the tenderness between them feels all the more precious against the surrounding violence. Both actors jointly received the Best Actor award at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, a recognition thoroughly deserved.

Dhont’s visual approach also contributes to the film’s immediacy. At times there is an almost cinéma vérité quality to the handheld camerawork, particularly as the soldiers’ jolt along in horse-drawn carts or struggle through the mud. It gives the film a contemporary, visceral quality, despite its early twentieth-century setting. We are brought close to the physical discomfort and uncertainty of their lives without relying on the familiar spectacle of battle.

The title itself becomes increasingly significant as the story develops. Some of the soldiers find their resilience cracking under the strain of war, while the military response to perceived cowardice brings its own brutal consequences. The film explores the terrible conflict between personal instinct and military duty, and asks what courage means when the world demands that young men abandon almost everything that makes them human.

Dhont, whose previous films include the award-winning Girl and Close, brings the same sensitivity to questions of identity, vulnerability and belonging, but here expands his canvas considerably. Coward is his most ambitious film to date, yet its real strength lies in its intimate observation of human relationships.

The historical setting is also significant. This is a distinctly Belgian perspective on the First World War, filmed on Belgian soil in the landscape where much of the conflict took place. While the 2024 film The Last Front also explored the Belgian experience of the war, Coward takes a very different approach. Rather than focusing on invasion, resistance or combat, it explores the inner lives of young Belgian soldiers behind the lines, and the emotional and creative worlds they construct for themselves.

The film grew out of Dhont’s discovery of historical photographs showing soldiers performing behind the front lines, wearing skirts made from sandbags and jewellery fashioned from discarded ammunition. His subsequent research, including visits to archives in London, Belgium and France, revealed accounts of soldiers using performance, cross-dressing and theatrical improvisation to entertain one another.

Developed over approximately three years with regular screenwriting collaborator Angelo Tijssens, the screenplay draws on this historical research. There is also a family dimension to the production, with Dhont’s younger brother Michiel serving as producer. The two brothers co-founded Belgian production company The Reunion in 2021, alongside the film’s other production partners.

One of the film’s most compelling achievements is the way it challenges conventional ideas of masculinity and heroism. The theatrical performances become an act of resistance in themselves. Creating beauty, finding companionship, expressing affection and allowing themselves to be vulnerable are all forms of courage in a world that has little room for tenderness.

There is something deeply moving about watching these young men transform the instruments of war into materials for art, turning discarded ammunition and sandbags into costumes and props. Their performances offer moments of collective release, a reminder that even in the darkest circumstances people continue to seek connection, laughter and creative expression.

Perhaps the film’s most remarkable achievement is its portrayal of intimacy. Its denouement contains one of the most unexpectedly erotic scenes I have ever seen, despite both men remaining fully clothed in an entirely ordinary domestic setting. It is a moment of such tenderness and emotional intensity that I found myself in tears. Dhont understands that desire does not need to be explicitly displayed to be profoundly affecting. Sometimes a gesture, a look or the simple closeness of two people can communicate more than any conventional cinematic love scene.

Although Coward is rooted in a particular history of queer experience, its emotional reach is universal. Dhont and his brother Michiel (both gay themselves) have developed a body of work that looks beyond a heterosexual perspective on relationships and identity. Dhont’s 2022 film Close explored adolescent intimacy and vulnerability; here, he turns to the largely hidden experiences of men during the First World War.

The relationship between Pierre and Francis feels both specific to its time and strikingly timeless. Their love exists within a world that offers them few opportunities to express it openly, yet the film never reduces their story to one of suffering. Instead, it celebrates the possibility of joy, intimacy and connection even when circumstances seem determined to deny them.

Coward is not simply another First World War film, nor is it just a story of forbidden love. It is a beautifully observed exploration of the relationships between men, the restrictions imposed by traditional masculinity and the extraordinary resilience of the human imagination.

As the latest in what has been a particularly impressive CineCity programme, it is a film I am glad to have seen. Tender, visually compelling and quietly radical in its approach to the war genre, Coward offers a different way of remembering the First World War, not through the machinery of battle but through the young lives caught up in it.

A truly special piece of cinema.

Details

CINECITY THE BRIGHTON FILM FESTIVAL – ADVENTURES IN WORLD CINEMA

Films, talks and special events from 6-15 NOV 2026.

Venue: Screenings at the Duke of York’s Picturehouse, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts. Check website for details.

Tickets: Book online direct from each venue – details on Cinecity website.