The Wound review – raw pain and challenge of male circumcision drama

John Trengove’s boldly transgressive film tells the story of a city kid’s traditional initiation ritual and the secret gay sexuality of his mentors in a mountain retreat

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The Wound of the title has a number of metaphorical applications, mostly to do with the agony involved in suppressing the truth about your sexuality, and also in revealing it. It could be a symbol for the secret emotional pain that exists alongside the male aggression and male adventure that is effectively using it as fuel, maybe calling to mind Philoctetes, the warrior in the Iliad, abandoned by his comrades on the remote island of Lemnos before the Trojan war because of a noxious suppurating wound and yet rescued because his magical bow is needed.

It is an intimate and boldly transgressive drama from the white South African director John Trengove, about circumcision and initiation rituals. Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini) is a Xhosa city kid from Johannesburg whose father, Khwalo (Gabriel Mini), thinks he is getting a little too pampered. So he arranges for his son to have the traditional circumcision – not in a hospital, but on a remote mountain, a retreat with other young “initiates” who will be cut and then live in huts for the week or so that it will take their wounds to heal, bonding, and promising never to speak again about what they have experienced. They will be under the disciplinarian control of elders or mentors who are effectively volunteers, eagerly taking time away from their own dull jobs to administer this traditional rite of passage – and maybe relive something they have come to think of as the most intensely real experience of their lives.

Continue reading... April 26, 2018 at 08:00PM