Beasts of No Nation: A Different Kind of African War Film

Beasts of No Nation (2015) is a devastating picture, striking in color and tone, disarming in its honesty. Following the disintegration of the village’s buffer zone, Agu’s mother and sister are sent to the capital, leaving him and the men of the village to guard their ancestral home. The NRC (National Reformation Council), a fictional cold-blooded military group that has seized control of the country, arrives and murders his father and brother, along with many others, all of which Agu witnesses before escaping to the jungle. There, he comes across and is enlisted by a unit of the Native Defense Forces (NDF)—a rebel militia that counts young boys among its numbers—led by the charismatic Commandant (Idris Elba). This chance meeting sends Agu on a harrowing, murderous campaign, testing his young soul beyond human limits.

Fukunaga didn’t take on this heavy subject lightly. He had studied Central and West African conflicts, and specifically the Sierra Leone Civil War, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the 1990s. After graduating, he took a short script that centered child soldiers to New York University’s film school, and continued researching and working on the project there and, on and off, for years afterward. In the meantime, he crafted a couple of short films and wrote and directed his debut feature, Sin Nombre (2009), a ruthless road movie that intimately charts a journey across Mexico to the U.S. border through the eyes of a former gang member. Fukunaga followed that grim saga with a vividly bleak 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre, and in 2014 won further critical acclaim for helming the first season of True Detective, “a mystical southern noir,” as critic Jeremy Egner describes it. All three projects put on display Fukunaga’s trained eye for dangerous, sublime landscapes populated by, as Egner notes, “broken strivers”—and the same potent components also crop up in Beasts of No Nation. He finally found a fruitful new entry point for his child-soldier script after reading the Nigerian American author Uzodinma Iweala’s playfully poetic 2005 novel Beasts of No Nation, and he spent nine years painstakingly and faithfully adapting the book. During that time, he also struggled to find backing for this deeply tragic and violent, child-focused project without a sympathetic white character.   

Hollywood’s rare voyages to Africa have generally been undertaken by white saviors and/or through a white gaze: the midaughts produced a string of these as mainstream awards contenders—Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland. These films take their cues from an established and ongoing Western literary tradition wherein the exotic continent, supposedly populated by beasts and brutes, requires white eyes to peer into and reveal its mysteries. The film Beasts of No Nation follows the novel in not naming the country or conflict (hence the title); trying to decipher where the narrative takes place misses the point of the movie’s burnished patina and opening shot—that television shell. For much of America, if Africa exists anywhere, it’s on the news. Consider the way breaking broadcasts reduce the bountiful history of the continent to a country’s worst moments; the only sense of locality offered is a barrage of alphabet-soup-named factions. “I actually think most Americans think Africa is one country,” Fukunaga once candidly noted.

Rather than location, it is Agu’s interiority that lends specificity and authenticity to the feverish events. Attah’s narration, sporadically but pointedly deployed by Fukunaga, not only vocalizes the boy’s descent but, with its pronounced perspective, implies a kind of agency. Often in child-centered war narratives, atrocities without reason merely map themselves onto the young protagonists. The children of Germany Year Zero and Johnny Mad Dog do not articulate their feelings regarding their debased environments. The audience can thus view the heinous crimes they commit as being brought about solely by situation or place. Fukunaga’s choice to preserve the subjectivity of Iweala’s novel and do without the benefit of the doubt afforded by a supposedly objective camera opens up fascinating terrain. When Agu meets the bare-chested, beret-wearing Commandant, a seeming father figure to the cultlike ragtag army, the leader’s second-in-command (Kurt Egyiawan) comments that Agu is just a boy. The Commandant retorts: “A boy has hands to strangle and fingers to pull triggers . . . A boy is very, very dangerous.”

Elba, in probably the best performance of his career to date, plays the Commandant with remarkable depth. His melodic recitation of Iweala’s words, his intoxicating aura and ability to transmit cold, terrorizing undercurrents brings us into the Commandant’s universe on the same transfixing wave that Agu rides. During an inspiring speech that the Commandant gives to his troops in the mountains shortly after Agu’s arrival, Fukunaga uses a static single camera angle to capture Elba, perched with a cane, atop a rock. The shabby army surrounds him, hanging on his every word like raindrops on leaves as he implores the young to seize their own wealth, to remember that this unit is an unbreakable family—words that will take on the added sinister cast of grooming in light of the sexual abuse we learn about later.

Fukunaga works on these multiple levels of subtext with ease, taking familiar beats and deploying them to more sharply traumatic ends. Agu’s first kill—a common rite for child soldiers in reality as well as in films—is one unnerving example. The tight frame fills with Agu’s blank, hesitant visage, as he stands with a machete over a naked man who says he is an engineering student, and who pleads loudly for mercy. The golden sun is setting, and Agu’s machete comes down harshly into the man’s skull. Composer Dan Romer’s synthesizer roars, blood spatters across the lens, and the frame slows to devour Agu and his new friend Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye) as their blades gnash the prisoner to bits. “I have killed a man. It is the worst sin, but am knowing, too, it is the right thing to be doing,” Agu says fearfully to himself. Though a child, he is conscious of right and wrong, and there is nothing to shield him from our judgment.

And yet we can’t totally see him as brutish. In fact, he is, at points, valiant. In one captivating scene, the Commandant proclaims: “We will take that fucking bridge.” He works himself into a dripping sweat, chanting the children and other soldiers to ecstasy, leaning his head into their chests, willing them to invincibility. The murals behind him read: “Our Nation. Our Future.” and “The Power Is in Your Hands.”

“Fukunaga allows two truths to coexist: Agu can be a monster and a hero. A child and a killer. A victim and a victimizer.”

They march headlong into open fire, into the smoke of death. No armor. Barely any clothes to speak of. Fukunaga’s fevered framing eloquently captures their incredible triumphs: a rocket launcher here, a cascade of bullets there, Romer’s sublime score tracking their ascendance and eventual victory in the scene. The army’s return to headquarters also lingers in my mind: the convoy of trucks overflowing with the young fighters, resolutely riding with guns up, could be a Roman legion arriving to a rose-petal parade à la Gladiator. It demonstrates Fukunaga’s willingness to allow two truths to coexist: Agu can be a monster and a hero. A child and a killer. A victim and a victimizer.

Beasts of No Nation itself, likewise, can’t be narrowly defined. You can feel the grimy, systematic hands of colonialism during the Commandant’s visit with NDF leader Dada Goodblood (Jude Akuwudike). Consider how Goodblood’s deputy receives foreigner visitors, there to speculate over the country’s resources, but leaves the perturbed Commandant and his soldiers waiting in the lobby. The sequence exemplifies the ways that opportunists can pose as revolutionary leaders and betray their countries for Western (and now Eastern) consumption.

Grief is also strewn across Beasts of No Nation. Agu, Strika, and the other young men, through killing, mourn their lost country, their departed way of life, and their deceased families. Balletic rage bursts out during a village raid: a hallucinating Agu sees the African bush in a freakish infrared tint, and with disturbing precision shoots down unarmed civilians. While high on “gun juice,” he mistakes a female prisoner of war for his mom, accuses her of being a witch, then stomps her daughter to death. Later, he hears his mother’s singing in the jungle, and the sound offers him a spellbound calm. It’s notable that Agu seems to pine only for his mom. He rarely recalls his other family members. If we associate the maternal absence with a bygone motherland, the loss compounds like banks of storm clouds.