Newsflash: a town in Uganda has been butchered by a gang of soldiers. The report begins with a wide shot of the local area, then shows grainy mobile phone footage of men firing guns at each other. We see pictures of the bloody aftermath; the reporter conducts interviews with the witnesses and survivors; and finally, a picture is shown of an 8-year-old child in a green military jacket with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.
Question: when would you change the channel?
Perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps you'd sit through the entire thing and try to process it; ponder how such terrible, primitive evil can still exist in our supposedly gentrified world with iPhones and the internet and UN peacekeepers and the like. Then, you'd probably go about your day as per the norm - since how much difference can you realistically make?
Whether we like to or not, we compartmentalise the news we receive in order to make our existence more bearable. But, every now and then, a film like Beasts of No Nation will come along and try and shake us out of our mundane reality: remind us that, yes, even now, there are parts of the world that are practically unliveable, be you old or young, man or woman, a member of an army or a member of a rebellion. Or, if you're a young boy like Agu (Abraham Attah), caught somewhere in between, with no place left to run but into the arms of the devil.
The film takes place in an unnamed African country and centres on Agu and his family, who live in a village on the UN buffer zone by a neighbouring state. He lives a happy, stable life with his family; his father provides land to the refugees from a nearby civil war, which has angered many members of his own community. (Does this sound familiar?) However, it's not long before the village hears reports that the war is moving closer. Agu's mother and sister get away, but after being captured by the army Agu sees his father and brother brutally murdered, and he is left scared and alone in the vast African wilderness.
Enter Idris Elba's Commandant. He is swaggering, ruthless and, above all, charismatic, so much so that he has compelled a battalion of (very) young soldiers to swear their loyalty and fight for him. He finds Agu in the jungle and sees potential in him, and decides to induct him into the tribe. Agu has to learn how to fire a gun, take a beating, and participate in an unforgiving initiation ceremony, where the price of failure is having your throat slit.
The Commandant's appeal is cultish - he has soldiers fire blanks at the boys to make them believe they invincible, and he even has them believe they are part of his "family", saying: "I will always protect you because you are my son. And a son always protects a father." Of course, this results in an almost unwatchable sequence where Agu is told to kill a man with a machete. "These are the dogs that killed your father," he says, even as the man pleads he is only an engineer out to fix bridges. Inevitably, Agu and his friend Strika end up hacking the man to bits.
This is a very nasty and violent film. Yet I think it would be disingenuous to make it any other way. To truly understand a world where this can be allowed to happen, the film has to submerge the viewer in a world of blood, sweat, mud and more blood, and take the most sacred of cinematic icons - the innocent child - and crush it into dust, to devastating effect.
Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director, is a master of storytelling and atmosphere, as both Sin Nombre and True Detective proved. But this is arguably his best film. It takes a clear social message and imbues it with astonishing cinematic ability: an amazing sequence sees Agu rub hallucinogenic drugs into his wound that transform his environment into a reddish alien environment, one where he no longer finds himself shocked by the violence around him.
The performances are also superb. Elba is, as you'd expect, dominant as a villainous evil allowed to enact his savagery across the land; though he finds himself frustrated by the fact that his government superiors are constantly yanking on his choke chain. He certainly deserves an Oscar nomination, if only for the sickeningly physical scene where he pumps up his soldiers for a fight. But the real revelation is Abraham Attah, a newcomer who is utterly convincing as a child whose expression becomes dead and glazed as he sees a vast menagerie of terrible acts against humanity.
It's also worth noting that the film's cinematic references are vast, ranging from the muddy landscapes of Apocalypse Now to the balletic duel between nature and war in The Thin Red Line. Yet I'd say its closest relative, in terms of sheer brutality, is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian; it shares the atmosphere of a gory, savage journey through an unremittingly bleak warscape that overwhelms the senses and destroys any sense of hope. There are also more than a few parallels between Elba's Commandant and McCarthy's Judge, their evil manifesting itself in child rape and their superhuman ability to compel others to commit violence in their name; and both instil respect through fear, to the point where their subordinates cannot bring themselves to shoot them, given the chance, for fear they might miss.
Beasts of No Nation marks the start of Oscar season in earnest. It is a tremendous success for Netflix - who prove that it is the message that matters, not the medium - and it is one of the best films of the year.
★★★★½
