War doesn’t always look like smoke, rubble, and soldiers marching through the streets. Sometimes, it can arrive through a girl in designer clothes, holding a pose for a camera, while her mind burns quietly behind her eyes. The Tender Ones Will Triumph captures that haunting contradiction — the silent collision between the world’s beauty and the unbearable pain of war.

The film follows a young Ukrainian immigrant living in Poland, a model who’s carved out a fragile niche in the glossy world of fashion. On the surface, she’s thriving — elegant, adored, social-media-famous. But beneath the curated posts and runway lights, there’s an invisible war raging. She is, in every sense, displaced — geographically, emotionally, spiritually.

The film breathes through atmosphere — muted tones, lingering close-ups, and an ambient sound design that blurs the boundary between external and internal chaos. The sounds of explosions and sirens bleed into the soundtrack like intrusive thoughts. At times, you’re unsure if they’re happening in the world or inside her head — and that’s the point. Trauma, the film suggests, doesn’t fade with distance. It echoes.

There’s a particularly striking sequence midway through: the protagonist stands in front of a mirror during a photoshoot, her face illuminated by harsh studio lights, while in her ears, the faint sounds of artillery return. Everyone else in the room laughs and chats — yet she’s somewhere else entirely. The war has colonised her psyche. Her silence becomes more expressive than any line of dialogue could be. The film introduces a kind and talented fashion designer, who briefly becomes a source of grounding for her. Their relationship — professional but tinged with unspoken empathy — brings a flicker of warmth into the film’s otherwise cold aesthetic. Through him, she glimpses the possibility of normalcy, or maybe redemption. But even that tenderness feels temporary, fragile — like a patch of light before the next storm. Throughout the story, her mother’s calls punctuate the narrative like a recurring alarm bell. Each ring is a confrontation she’s not ready for. The film handles these moments beautifully — her hesitation, her anxiety, the way her fingers hover over the phone before she sets it aside. It’s a small act of denial, but it’s deeply human. Because answering might mean facing what she already knows in her bones: that something terrible has happened back home. When the truth finally arrives — her brother’s death — it’s not dramatised. No slow-motion breakdown, no melodramatic score. The revelation lands quietly, devastatingly, in the way real grief often does: like a sudden silence that swallows everything else. She leaves the fashion shoot, the studio lights, the pretence of glamour — all of it — and walks into the streets, joining an anti-war protest. That single act becomes her transformation. For the first time, she stops performing and starts existing.

Visually, the film is stunning. The camera loves stillness. Every frame feels deliberate, as if trying to hold on to a world that keeps slipping away. The cinematography leans into desaturated colours — greys, soft blues, pale light — mirroring her internal numbness. The contrast between the fashion world’s artificial brightness and the subdued palette of her private life underscores the film’s central tension: beauty as distraction, beauty as denial.

But perhaps what makes The Tender Ones Will Triumph most affecting is its restraint. It never tells you what to feel. It simply places you in the uneasy space between survival and guilt, between artifice and authenticity. The title itself feels ironic at first — “tenderness” seems like a luxury in a world of war — but by the end, it feels like prophecy. In her act of protest, in her refusal to keep smiling for the camera, tenderness does triumph. Not the soft, comforting kind — but the raw, painful tenderness of truth.

By the film’s end, the director makes a heartfelt plea for the gentle souls who’ve been silenced for centuries — the ones long overshadowed by the so-called “vocal” few. The film becomes a quiet flame of hope for them, reminding us that, in the end, it’s the tender ones who truly triumph. 

In an age where social media curates every emotion and global tragedies turn into hashtags, this film is a quiet rebellion. It reminds us that behind every filtered photo is a life stitched together with invisible wounds. And sometimes, the most political act isn’t shouting — it’s allowing yourself to feel.

The Tender Ones Will Triumph isn’t a typical anti-war film in the traditional sense. It’s a film about what war does to the people who flee it — how it lingers in their bodies, their dreams, their silence. It’s about the courage to stop pretending everything is fine. And in that vulnerability, the film finds its power. Given the gravity of its subject matter, I’d rate the film a solid 4 out of 5 stars.