"Moffie" is an Unforgiving and Exquisite Mirror (Film)

Moffie takes its title from an Afrikaans anti-gay slur, which might lead viewers to think that the film is primarily about the sexuality of its main character, Nicholas van der Swart. But the film is not a coming-out story, though there is a moment of revelation. Nor is it a romance, despite a pair of tender scenes. It is primarily a study of toxic masculinity and the cost of surviving it.

Set in the South African Border War of the early 1980s, Moffie, directed by Oliver Hermanus, follows Nicholas through his two years of compulsory military service. As a South African of British extract in an Afrikaner power structure, Nicholas is used to being an outsider. But his ethnicity is only the beginning of his troubles within his unit. To survive, Nicholas must navigate the brutal rituals of toxic masculinity that make up the bulk of the film’s plot. A sadistic sergeant haunts Nicholas and his mates, looking for and creating reasons to break them and/or ship them off to Ward 22, the military “looney bin,” as Nicholas’s friend Michael Sachs puts it. Even scenes of male bonding, scenes that might offer some measure of relief from the hardships of Nicholas’s training, are transformed into opportunities for oppression: adolescent games like Spin the Bottle turn bloody as the men take turns hitting each other, cheered on by those hoping (or fearing) that the bottle will point at them next.

Through the whole story, Nicholas remains a nearly silent enigma. “My advice,” another moffie tells him, “is to remain invisible as much as possible.” And though Nicholas rejects the counsel, as well as the other soldier’s identification with him, in fact it has been Nicholas’s modus operandi his whole life. A flashback to his childhood at the community pool reveals that Nicholas knows the cost of being seen for who he really is. And so he moves through life as something of a cipher, allowing the people around him—his heteronormative father, his brutal army comrades, even his love interest, Stassen—to shape the circumstances to which Nicholas molds himself. It is silence as survival, which can be a frustrating trait in a main character. How can an audience identify with a character who eludes definition, who slides like water from one homophobic context to another?

Paradoxically, it may be Nicholas’s lack of definition that makes him the perfect vehicle for critiquing the toxic male culture around him. Like another Nick, the enigmatic narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nicholas exists as a lens on the culture—distinct from it, but carefully crafted for maximum transparency. Like a pair of glasses, the less we see Nicholas, the more clearly we see the world around him in unrelenting detail. That world leaves us little to feel good about. The final scene, shot half-underwater, divides the screen into that which is seen on the surface and that which goes on beneath it. But even under the waves, the bodies of Nicholas and Stassen remind us that invisibility takes its toll on the soul, wearing away like waves on the beach, until you’re not sure what you’re seeing, or whether you ever saw anything at all.

—Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Fiction Editor

Moffie is in theaters, and is available for rent from Apple, Amazon, or Google.