‘Coward’ Cannes Review: Lukas Dhont’s Quiet Portrait Of Queer Love And Survival In The Trenches

Period films about wartime conflicts seem to be a defining thread of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Several titles this year explore stories set during the First and Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and a range of contemporary conflicts — some real (Ukraine, Gaza), others invented or fictionalized.

Coward plants its flag squarely in World War I to tell the story of Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), a young soldier stationed at the Belgian front who faces the experience with the sparse, withdrawn quality of a farm boy who has seen little of the world — and finds himself emotionally overwhelmed by all of it.

What captivates Pierre at the front, beyond the occasional bombardments and skirmishes, is his encounter with a group of soldiers who have organized a kind of theater for their fellow troops — a troupe led by Francis (Valentin Campagne), another young man in his regiment with obvious artistic talent and far fewer inhibitions. Pierre has neither talent nor artistic ambitions — he’s a quiet, shy eighteen-year-old country kid — but he wants to be near that group, to belong to it. And the clearly mutual pull between him and Francis is no small thing.

The latest film from the director of Close centers, as that film did, on a gay love story that may not be forbidden outright but is at the very least deeply fraught given its context. The theater group’s performers frequently appear dressed as women, but the possibility that anything more than play-acting is involved never enters public consideration. For Pierre, though, something else is happening with Francis. And, it seems, for Francis too. Will they find a way to be together amid a situation like this?

Dhont is after a film of few words, close-ups, lingering looks, small gestures, fleeting touches. There’s little explanation of the war’s progress or its political context, and we learn almost nothing of either man’s life outside the regiment. The most revealing detail is that Francis doesn’t want the war to end — he has found a freedom here that he knows civilian life would never grant him — while Pierre wants to escape, to flee to the mountains, to be anywhere else. In fact, after a series of harrowing experiences, he deliberately injures himself so he can commit fully to the theater troupe and step back from the front lines.

This is a film that, with only the rarest of exceptions, isn’t trying to deliver emotional gut-punches or heightened drama. It moves quietly — often in near-silence — and many of its scenes are given over entirely to the musical and comic numbers the troupe performs while Pierre watches, first with curiosity and longing, then as a participant himself, in costume and all. Art may not be Pierre’s calling, and it doesn’t come easily — but the feelings it awakens catch him off guard, and hit harder than he ever expected.