Venice Film Festival 2015: Beasts Of No Nation, film review – a horrific account of the exploitation of a child soldier

This cruel story, based on the debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala, is dark and vicious but the film is too long and unstructured, says David Sexton
Flirtatious father figure: Idris Elba's Commandant is a toxic combination of Oliver Twist’s Fagin, Bill Sykes and Nancy
David Sexton9 September 2015

Beasts of No Nation is damagingly accurately titled. This horrific account of the induction and exploitation of a child soldier, Agu, aged between nine and 12 (hauntingly played by Ghanaian newcomer Abraham Attah) is set in a never-specified West African country, in a never-clarified civil conflict, between rebel groups and government forces, with Nigerian UN forces looking on helplessly. Does this universalise its theme — that making small orphaned children into savage killers is wrong? No, it vitiates it.

Beasts of No Nation, produced and distributed by Netflix, is based on the debut novel by the young Nigerian-American writer Uzodinma Iweala, Agu narrating his own story in broken, present-tense English. The director and cinematographer is Cary Joji Fukunaga, who made Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and the first series of the TV show True Detective.

Agu grows up in a large, nurturing family, albeit in a UN “buffer zone”. Then the zone is overrun, his mother flees and the rest of his family are arbitrarily murdered. Agu flees into the bush and falls into the hands of a ragtag rebel group, cultishly led by a charismatic monster, the Commandant, powerfully played by Idris Elba.

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1/99

The Commandant bullies Agu into chopping dead an innocent prisoner, by telling him he is the one who killed his father, and also cruelly abuses him sexually. Although the combat sequences are free-flowingly filmed, at 136 minutes the film is too long and unstructured, Agu’s attempt to return to childhood at the end little more than token. In comparison, Gerard Butler’s showboating biopic Machine Gun Preacher about an American evangelist taking on the “Lord’s Resistance Army” in Uganda and South Sudan seems toughly specific.

The only white faces seen here pass by fleetingly, aghast, in a white UN van. The viewer could sanely conclude from this film that some African countries are incapable of self-government. Or to put it another way, it could have been scripted by an extreme disciple of VS Naipaul, surely not the effect intended.

The Venice Film Festival continues until Sept 12.

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