'Moffie' is one of those films where a boy joins the military, goes through the random humiliations of basic training and Becomes A Man.
Conscripted into the South African military during the dying days of the apartheid era, Nick Van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) arrives at a training camp run by sadistic officers whose vocabulary appears to consist mainly of the word 'f***' (with an occasional 'c***' tossed in for variety). The next several months feature route marches, bullying in the barracks and the eating of vomit. There is also a tentative, platonic homosexual relationship with fellow recruit Stassen (Ryan de Villiers) - very dangerous as homosexuality is illegal. And always in the future lurks a posting to fight communist rebels on the border with Angola.
While the basic premise is not, of course, new, what makes this film different are the South African setting and the homosexual element (which, contrary to some publicity, is merely a part of the story rather than being the whole). As Nick, Brummer is a heartthrob in the making and I also found Matthew Vey, who plays Nick's cynical friend Michael, appealing. Hilton Pelser as the sergeant must have needed throat sweets to cope with all the bellowing he is required to do, but is also given a moment of awkward vulnerabilty. It might, perhaps, have been nice if de Villiers was given more to play with as regards his character; for such a pivotal role Stassen is curiously one-note, reduced pretty much to noble suffering. But that is not a major difficulty; this film is well worth watching. Seen at the London Film Festival 2019.
