FILMS

MOFFIE This tense and tender South African war drama takes us back to the early 1980s and the experiences of Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer), called up to fight on his country’s border with Angola. The film’s title is a homophobic slur, so immediately we’re on the lookout for how this handsome and green 18-year-old, who we follow right from his awkward goodbye to his parents (when his dad hands him a porn mag as a going-away gift), is going to manage within this violent, macho world. The film mostly unfurls in the limbo between call-up and action, focusing on the rituals of military training and the relationships between these young soldiers, all of them away from home and all trying to keep their heads above water within a suffocating and abusive culture.

Needless to say, army training camp is not theis that it doesn’t pitch Nicholas, whose attraction to one of the other recruits gradually emerges, directly against this aggressive, often nakedly homophobic culture. There’s no showdown, no sudden vicious turning on him. Instead, it shows how Nicholas just-about survives within this environment – a volatile culture that threatens to explode at any second. Much is left unsaid, or half-said, and it’s for the best: we’re always on the lookout for clues, made to do vital detective work ourselves. Writer-director Oliver Hermanus dwells on the physicality of these young soldiers – the contrast between their hard exteriors and their crushed insides – and the scenes of training and bodies in the sun recall Claire Denis’s brilliant French foreign legion drama . There’s little actual war to see in , but life still feels like a battle all the way through.