𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙱𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚍 𝙸𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙷𝚞𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙱𝚘𝚍𝚢

𝙲𝚘𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙻𝚞𝚔𝚊𝚜 𝙳𝚑𝚘𝚗𝚝

Cannes 2026

In Coward, Lukas Dhont creates one of the most unexpected war films of recent years — a film that consciously distances itself from the visual spectacle and monumental scale traditionally associated with war cinema, transforming World War I into something deeply intimate, psychological, and profoundly human.

The film is constructed almost entirely around two kinds of images: compressed close-ups of the soldier Pierre’s face and POV shots aligned with his gaze. Dhont rarely shows the battlefield in wide shots. There are no grand camera movements, sweeping landscapes, or spectacularly choreographed battle sequences. Instead, the camera remains attached to the protagonist’s face so intensely that skin, sweat, trembling eyes, and breathing themselves become the film’s primary geography.

This formal decision places Coward in a radically different territory from many contemporary war films. If works such as 1917 approached war through movement in space, landscape, and visual scale, Dhont searches for war within the human face itself. He almost removes the battlefield entirely in order to suggest that the real war takes place not in geography, but within the body and psyche of human beings.

One of the film’s most striking visual choices lies in its close-up compositions. Slightly elevated camera angles deepen the shadows around the soldiers’ eyes, transforming their gazes into prolonged and heavy stares. In Coward, looks are never merely looks; they carry fear, desire, exhaustion, anxiety, and violence. Each eye seems to become its own independent battlefield.

The lighting design is equally controlled and intelligent. Nearly all the frontline scenes are submerged in burning yellows, oranges, and dark browns, as though a feverish sun permanently hangs above the soldiers’ bodies. Yet this warmth never creates comfort or safety. Instead, it produces a sense of shared pain and collective fever. War in Coward is not cold; it feels like a contagious fever slowly consuming human bodies from within.

Whenever the film briefly distances itself from the battlefield, however, the image suddenly becomes cold, dark, and emotionally lifeless. Through this chromatic contrast, Dhont presents war not simply as a historical event, but as a psychological and sensory condition that continues to inhabit human beings even outside the front lines.

The editing, too, refuses the chaotic nervousness common in many modern war films. The cuts are soft, restrained, and carefully controlled, as though the film is less interested in reproducing the excitement of war than in immersing the viewer inside the soldiers’ mental state. Silence, pauses, and prolonged looks become more powerful than explosions themselves.

Perhaps the film’s most important layer, however, is its engagement with masculinity and power in wartime. Coward portrays an entirely male world — a space in which endurance, emotional repression, and readiness for violence form the foundation of masculine identity. Yet the film gradually reveals that what truly keeps these men alive is not violence, but art, music, performance, and collective intimacy.

At the emotional center of the film stands Francis. Through music, humor, theater, dance, and performance, he transforms the emotional atmosphere among the soldiers. His presence is not merely entertaining; it becomes a form of resistance against the logic of war itself. He introduces into this brutal world precisely what war attempts to destroy: tenderness, imagination, playfulness, and intimacy.

More importantly, what keeps these men emotionally alive and psychologically functional is itself deeply connected to gender performance. The theater troupe within the military camp, with its dancing performers, feminine costumes, and staged performances, suddenly introduces a strange gender ambiguity into the otherwise rigidly masculine military environment. Soldiers who spend their days trapped inside violent forms of militarized masculinity become fascinated by performances built around femininity, theatricality, and the fluidity of identity.

Dhont does not present these performances merely as entertainment. They become part of the soldiers’ psychological survival mechanism. It is as though war has pushed militarized masculinity to the point of collapse, forcing these wounded bodies to return toward softness, theatricality, performative bodies, and a hidden femininity in order to remain human.

In Coward, theater is not simply escapism; it becomes a temporary suspension of the role of “soldier” itself — a fragile space where bodies are briefly allowed to exist outside the violence demanded of them.

One of the film’s most beautiful recurring ideas lies in its use of collective songs and chants. These moments are not simply entertainment either; they function as emotional survival rituals. The songs transform the soldiers into a single collective body — a group of human beings desperately attempting to feel something resembling life before death consumes them.

In one of the film’s most important sequences, Dhont suddenly changes the visual language of the film. A camera that had remained trapped inside suffocating close-ups for nearly the entire runtime finally pulls back, revealing the soldiers in a collective and almost ceremonial composition strongly reminiscent of Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix — one of the most iconic visual representations of the French Revolution.

The flag at the center of the image, the shouting male bodies surrounding it, and the collective upward movement suddenly inject the film with a sense of victory, revolutionary energy, and communal hope. For a brief moment, the suffocating fever dream of Coward transforms into an image of freedom.

Dhont seems to transplant the visual memory of the French Revolution directly into the landscape of World War I, as though cinema itself were momentarily attempting to imagine the possibility of collective hope emerging from devastation.

What makes this reference even more fascinating is the gender structure of Delacroix’s painting itself. Nearly every body in the painting is male: wounded, armed, and immersed in revolutionary violence. Yet at the very center stands a single female figure — half-naked, carrying the flag, embodying liberty, hope, and collective movement.

Suddenly, Coward’s visual reference acquires another layer of meaning. Dhont’s film is likewise dominated by male bodies, military masculinity, and violence. Yet what keeps these men alive paradoxically returns once again to femininity, theatricality, softness, and gender performance.

Just as the female body in Delacroix’s painting becomes the symbolic carrier of hope, femininity in Coward becomes the final remaining possibility for preserving humanity inside war.

Yet Dhont never allows this triumphant image to become complete. The hill and hidden horizon partially conceal the continuation of movement, as though the film itself recognizes the fragility and incompleteness of this moment of victory. If Delacroix’s bodies move openly toward the future and the horizon, Coward hides its horizon behind darkness and mountains. Even victory itself remains unstable, unfinished, and partially obscured by war.

The importance of this sequence becomes even more striking when we remember that the film contains almost no long shots at all. Dhont intentionally traps the world of the film inside close-ups and enclosed spaces, departing from this visual strategy only twice: first in this revolutionary flag sequence, and second when the protagonist opens the door of the house where he has been hiding and decides to escape into darkness and night.

These two long shots are both tied to the idea of escape and possibility. One imagines collective belonging and victory; the other imagines disappearance, solitude, and flight into darkness. The outside world appears only at moments when the protagonist attempts to move beyond his current condition — either toward others, or away from everyone entirely.

Alongside these moments, images of mass graves and the transportation of corpses repeatedly return throughout the film. Perhaps one of the film’s most painful ideas lies precisely here: witnessing dead bodies seems more unbearable for the soldiers than warfare itself. Human beings may become accustomed to violence, but never fully to death itself. The carrying and burial of bodies gradually acquire an almost ritualistic quality, as though war continues not only through killing, but through forcing human beings into continuous physical contact with death.

Ultimately, Coward is not a film about victory or defeat. It is a film about bodies attempting to preserve fragments of humanity beneath the burning fever of war.

Lukas Dhont once again proves that he is far less a filmmaker of spectacle than a filmmaker of fragile human emotions — a director capable of condensing the entirety of World War I into a single prolonged and silent gaze.