If there were any question marks still floating over Cary Fukunaga’s credentials, his latest film, Beasts of No Nation, should flick them aside with ease. Based on the acclaimed novel by American writer Uzodinma Iweala and boasting staggering performances from both of its lead players, Abraham Attah and Idris Elba, Fukunaga has delivered one of the most viscerally stylized war films in recent memory. The Africa-set drama is a relentlessly violent, vibrant, and electric film that is at once as druggy and entrancing as Coppola’s 1979 cut of Apocalypse Now and as sonically inventive as Elem Klimov’s Come and See.
Beasts of No Nation is the fictional first-hand account of Agu (Attah), a creative, intelligent figure who, following a brutal separation from his family, ends up fighting for a squadron of child soldiers as civil war and genocide rage in the unnamed nation around them. Elba plays the group’s bewitching Commandant, a manipulative, Boko Haram-styled father figure acting as Fagin to Agu’s Oliver Twist. Under his tutelage, seduced by the lifestyle, look, and machinery of war, and fueled by revenge and the hope of reuniting with his mother, Agu slips down the rabbit hole.
The group descends into conflict for a large part of Beasts‘ second half. Agu is often intoxicated in these instances, and it’s an exhilarating experience for the viewer, too; a collage of smoke, vibrant colors, and slow motion dance, the soundtrack phasing between chants and electronic noise. Here, Fukunaga proves a maverick. The most bravado visual flourish comes midway through, when Fukunaga drowns the screen in a Day-Glo pink and turquoise hue; it’s Kurtz down-the-river-level material, akin to Joseph Conrad on L.S.D.
Beasts is a visual stunner, but Elba himself has hardly looked better either. The Hackney native offers his most dominant performance yet, cushioning the rhythms of the West African lilt with deft control as his adolescent supporting players accentuate his towering build on the screen. His counterpart here, young newcomer Abraham Attah, is no less striking. Having come from unexpected places — being noticed by casting director Harrison Nesbit while out playing football with some friends — Attah miraculously matures his character as the events of the film unfold.
The moral side-stepping should not be understated. Its scribe, Iweala, is a Washington, D.C.-raised, privately schooled Harvard graduate. His book could therefore be viewed as a piece of academic fiction. The location is familiar but abstract, as are the characters that exist within it. Perhaps it is only through removing the shackles of direct geopolitical references that we are able to clearly empathize with the lives of these kids. It’s difficult to think of another film that so expertly takes a child soldier as a protagonist, certainly not one in the American mainstream.
Fukunaga strikes one as a director of great intelligence, but whatever might be going on from a moral standpoint, his nose for shock and style is remarkable. Purples, greens, and oranges dominate the color palette. Children’s rhymes, rousing gospel, throbbing guttural base, and swelling orchestral strings round out Dan Romer’s terrific score. The sound design alone is a marvel — bullets whizz by and hammer crashes on steel. One may recall George Orwell’s recollections from his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as Beasts’ first nerve-racking battle sequence plays out. Orwell wrote that it’s not the getting shot that scares you, but more the when and where the bullet might hit.
While Netflix, teaming with Bleecker Street, will set a precedent with a worldwide digital release accompanied by a small theatrical bow, courtesy of the latter, it’s difficult not to be bummed out by the news. There is a marvelous level of detail to the image and soundscape of Beasts of No Nation that feels so crucial to the whole experience. The fact that so many will be denied this in their presentation is unfortunate. Alas, such are the way of things, and we can at least be pleased that such a compelling film is at the forefront.
Beasts of No Nation premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opens in a limited release and on Netflix on October 16.