Moffie is a film about war, but not just the one fought on the battlefield. Set during apartheid-era South Africa in the early 1980s, it tells the story of Nicholas, a young white man conscripted into the army—where masculinity is brutalized into obedience, and any hint of queerness is hunted down with violent fervor. The word “moffie”, a slur for gay men in Afrikaans, becomes the specter haunting every interaction.

This is not a loud film. It moves slowly, with oppressive silence and long stares, mirroring the inner struggle of its protagonist. The beauty of Moffie lies in its restraint—how it says so much through what remains unsaid. It’s about codes: social, military, sexual. The camera lingers not on explosions but on the tension between gazes, the weight of bodies in close quarters, the ache of repression.

Kai Luke Brümmer delivers a haunting performance—not expressive, but precisely the opposite. His stillness, his reluctance to speak, feels like a defense mechanism built in real time. Hermanus directs with poetic intensity, bathing scenes in harsh light or grainy greys, as if the film itself is trying to erase softness.

Moffie isn’t only about queer identity under militarism; it’s also a sharp critique of a white supremacist system that polices all forms of perceived weakness. The training sequences are claustrophobic, violent, and deeply psychological—masculinity, whiteness, and nationalism enforced through humiliation and terror.

This is a film about survival, but not necessarily victory. It’s about how a system poisons intimacy, trust, and even the ability to name one’s desires. The war in Moffie is both external and internal—and the cost of silence is devastating.

Brutal, poetic, and emotionally raw, Moffie asks us to consider how identity can be both shield and target in a world built to crush difference. It lingers long after the credits, like a memory that refuses to stay buried.