Although he doesn’t really have that many lines to deliver, it might be Hilton Pelser who makes most impact here as the obnoxious and bigoted “Sgt. Brand” who is in charge of a troop of national service conscripts in South Africa at the start of the 1980s. Every white lad over 18 had to do his national service and so, of course, a mixture of the cerebral and the more thuggish all assemble at this boot camp where this man rules with a rod of iron. “Nicholas” (Kai Luke Brummer) is one of those men. A smaller, gentler, sort who has a secret that he must keep at all costs. Initially, he struggles to reconcile his innate nature with the brutal training provided by a military that was is the last throes of propping up it’s government, but he knows that failure will only make matters worse for him and his family especially as the solution for those “enemies” of colour was to shoot them; the solution for “degenerate” men like him was altogether different! As the dangers of exposure gradually increase and with him now posted to the Angolan border where the ammunition was definitely live, his sexuality becomes much harder for him to contain. At times this is really quite an uncomfortable film to watch as it quite potently combines elements of brutality and cruelty with just about every kind of discrimination possible. Pelser really delivers sparingly but potently and Brummer plays the hiding in plain sight role effectively as his character exudes a palpable sense of vulnerability as he constantly walks on eggshells amidst a toxic environment of fear and bullying. It’s possibly because it rather plausibly combines issues of sexuality, politics, racism and even an hint of romance into it, that this film resonates quite powerfully and augmented by some pithy and gritty dialogue offers us something thought-provoking on a number of levels.
