A powerful film about the nature of childhood, family and war – Beasts of No Nation tells an uncompromising story aided by the talents of its two lead actors.
An unrelenting, violent film, Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation opens not with gunshots, or screaming, but with the sounds of childhood laughter. When young Agu (Abraham Attah) has his happy life and family torn apart by an unspecified African civil war, he flees into the jungle to an almost certain death. Through a series of unfortunate events, he finds himself recruited by the rebel Native Defense Force, and falls under the command of the mysterious yet magnetic Commandant (Idris Elba). What follows is a movie about the nature of family, love, and the way in which war can blacken a once-pure soul.
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The film does not concern itself with the politics or rationale behind the ambiguous civil war in an unnamed African country, and it gets bogged down during the few times that it does. Agu’s point-of-view and the audience’s point-of-view are immediately one and the same; the nature of the conflict and the looming danger early in the film are communicated through worried looks on the faces of adults, and bits of radio broadcast.
From there, this young character begins to lose everyone and everything he cares about one by one in a sequence of devastating losses. Such a progression of dire circumstances completely sells us on his willingness to sign on to the NDR when it finally finds him – he’s broken, desperate, and will probably be killed if he doesn’t agree to fight, anyway. Fukunaga does an excellent job of drawing comparisons between Agu’s old life and his new one, showing how he becomes indoctrinated into combat when war and training supplant his childhood games in a very Lord of the Flies-esque manner.
Films centering on the myriad conflicts of the African continent are nothing new, with stories like Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, and Black Hawk Down becoming modern classics in recent years. However, those films almost universally told these harsh stories through the eyes of outsiders, or people on the morally righteous side of their respective conflict. Beasts of No Nation sets itself apart with its willingness to broach its subject matter from the point of view of an aggressor. Agu didn’t start this war, he has most certainly become a victim of it, but by the time the credits roll, the audience still cannot condone or justify the things he has done.
Anyone who has watched True Detective’s impeccable first season already knows that Fukunaga can craft beautiful visuals, and he certainly uses that skill to great effect in Beasts. The film has the feel of a documentary, as Fukunaga uses handheld shots, long takes, and natural lighting to follow Agu and his friends while they have fun and fight side by side. At times only the presence of the recognizable Elba is what reminds us that we are watching a movie.
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