Moffie

Apartheid. A brutal regime that draped state sanctioned horror all across South Africa from 1948 until the early 90's. Racism was part of law, apartheid helped fuel it, enforcing segration on a majority black population by a minority white government. Under the regime white men prospered. Straight white men. Racism wasn't the only ism that flourished in the era. The title of this film is Moffie. The Afrikaans word for 'faggot'. Be prepared to hear it a lot.

Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) is 18 years old and in 1981 South Africa that only means one thing. The army. 2 years of it. Written into law. There's no way to escape it. South Africa's at war with Angola and before he heads to the border to fight him and his fellow recruits have to be turned into killing machines. Dehumanisation is the word of the day. The training regime is horrifying. Any differences are instantly picked up on and used as ammunition for humiliation, both by trainer and trainee. Nicholas is gay and understandably keeping that to himself. Until the night he spends a night in a trench with another recruit called Dylan (Ryan de Villiers).

Christ this was a hard watch. Brutality heaped on brutality. It's the kind of film you need to steel yourself for because it will ruin your day. The military training regime depicted here makes Full Metal Jacket, which the film has taken it's structure from btw, look like a care bear's picnic. It's first 45 minutes are a constant, appalling, claustrophobic (made even more so by the film's 4:3 aspect ratio) barrage of abuse, racism and homophobia, designed to knock any hint of humanity from these would be soldiers. It's hard to watch these young men losing their souls, baby faces hardening, a foundation being built for a lifetime of hate. Moffie may be the story of a lost young man but it's an indictment of a whole country's way of thinking.

Barely a moment goes by without a depiction of trauma that will stick with you. The recruits on their way to camp abusing an elderly Black man waiting for a train, reminding you that hate is a constant state of mind in Marais Viljoen's South Africa. Bored young men punching each other in the face as a game, a brutal scene of toxic masculinity playing out to the blunt sound of  Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, that's as unsettling as any scene in a horror film. The moment a game of volleyball (A sly nod to that famously homoerotic moment in Top Gun) comes in an end in a petrifying yet inevitable way. The flashback to Nicholas's youth were his sexuality is discovered in the worst possible circumstance. Scenes that will play in your mind for weeks after you've seen them. The last scene in particular is something else, shot in a manner that plunges you into the moment with no way to escape. Despite the horror, this really is one beautiful looking movie. Director Oliver Hermanus really knows how to grab you and not let you go.

Kai Luke Brummer's turn as Nicholas is a stunner too, with sparse dialogue letting him say more with looks than any number of words. His pain is evident but you can see him bottle it up in every scene, and despite yourself you want him to keep his secret because as we see horribly, the army is no place to come out of the closet.  It's not all darkness thankfully, Nicholas's friendship with another recruit called Sachs (Matthew Vey) offers us slivers of light and then we get the ending. It's not a fairytale one, it was never going to be but......it's kinda sorta hopeful and after the catalogue of horrors we've just sat through we've earned it.

Moffie is streaming online now. It's fair tough but it's worth your while.