Beasts Of No Nation Review

After eight attention-grabbing episodes of True Detective and a Jane Eyre adaptation, Cary Fukunaga returns to the themes of brutality, violence and corrupted innocence of his breakthrough film, Sin Nombre, with this powerful adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel about a boy soldier caught in the bloody conflict of an unnamed West African country.

With the UN barely holding back the tide of civil war, nine year-old Agu (Attah) flees the massacre of his family by rebel soldiers, only to run straight into the clutches of the militia’s charismatic Commandant (Elba), who adopts the boy and begins to train him in the ways of soldiery — including the killing of anyone believed to be sympathetic to government forces. As the Commandant’s men (and boys) trudge towards a showdown with the enemy, white UN vehicles glide by like ghosts, unable — or unwilling — to intervene. The parallels with Rwanda, Darfur and too many other African conflicts are obvious.

Idris Elba, too big for television but with an unproven ability to carry a film, finds himself once again caught between the small and big screens, as Beasts Of No Nation becomes a ‘Netflix Original’, with only a limited theatrical release. Yet for all its awards-friendly worthiness, creative flair and technical prowess, the story may prove a little too much for Academy voters — not to mention Netflix viewers — to stomach. Still, Attah gives a preternaturally assured performance, and Elba is a formidable presence.

Fukunaga’s steely-eyed yet sensitive adaptation adopts the novel’s first-person approach, portraying the carnage from Agu’s point of view, allowing us to observe the corrupting forces preying upon the young boy’s psyche. Only once does Fukunaga allow himself to look away but, even then, what he elects not to show proves no less horrific than the film’s most harrowing moments. It’s one of many astute judgments in a searingly powerful, unflinchingly brutal and almost unbearably bleak film.