Coward

Lukas Dhont's Coward is the Belgian director's third feature, following Girl (2018) and Close (2022), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. A Belgian–French–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. Dhont co-wrote the screenplay, as before, with Angelo Tijssens.

Set at the height of the First World War, the film follows Pierre, a soldier newly arrived at the front and eager to prove himself, who meets Francis, a comrade determined to lift 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, tenderness and the fragile intimacies that form between men under unbearable pressure. The handheld camerawork and the largely young, partly non-professional ensemble give the film the close, breath-on-skin texture that has become Dhont's signature.

Coward extends the preoccupations of Close — masculinity, emotional repression, the cost 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. For a director still in his thirties, it confirms a body of work unusually devoted to the inner lives of boys and men, and to the question of what it costs them to feel.