Coward

Lukas Dhont's Coward is the Belgian director's third feature, after Girl (2018) and Close (2022), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. A Belgian, French and Dutch co-production, it premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, where its two young leads, Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia, shared the Best Actor prize. As on his earlier films, Dhont wrote the screenplay with Angelo Tijssens.

It is the height of the First World War. Pierre, newly arrived at the front and eager to prove himself, meets Francis, a comrade set on lifting the men's spirits by putting together a theatre show behind the lines. Around the violence of the trenches Dhont builds a study of fear and tenderness, and of the fragile intimacies that form between men under unbearable pressure. Handheld camerawork and a young, partly non-professional ensemble give the film the close, breath-on-skin texture that has become his signature.

Coward carries the preoccupations of Close (masculinity, emotional repression, the price of conformity) onto a far larger historical canvas. The Cannes premiere drew a long standing ovation, and Mubi acquired the film for much of the world. Dhont is still in his thirties, and his body of work is already unusually devoted to the inner lives of boys and men, and to what it costs them to feel anything at all.