Critics reviews

Fukunaga is a wonderful visual stylist, and there's a virtuosic freshness to the cinematography that, as with True Detective, carries you quite far before it starts to get stale. But just as True Detective's much-lauded aesthetic achievement eventually revealed itself as just old noir in new bottles, Beasts ultimately goes nowhere. It not only draws on its predecessors: it is imprisoned by them.

To remind us that [the adult commander is] actually a psychopath, the film's child protagonist is forced to give his leader a blow job (off screen), neatly transforming the commander into a pedophile. The scene comes straight from the novel but plays as if something beyond the pale and unrelated to warfare had to be introduced to get things back on the morally correct track. And this is only the most blatant example of the film's perniciousness.

In one particular sequence, the camera snakes its way – at length and without any cuts – through a raided building, tracking Agu, high and traumatised, as he first tries to embrace a terrified woman whom he has mistaken for his mother, and then, after seeing his comrades begin to rape her, shoots her dead himself, before surveying the murder and mayhem taking place in the town below. The sheer technical bravura of this single take embeds and implicates us in the action with Agu.

As an odyssey through the human condition, from the shores of integrity to depravity and back, Beasts of No Nation is a chilling warning against blind ideology and rhetoric and a guarded celebration of resilience, all dressed up as pretty bracing cinema.

All respect to Fukunaga for attempting the very difficult task of tackling this subject matter in a feature-film context, and for doing so with some degree of psychological nuance. But, still, "harrowing" as it is, Beasts of No Nation doesn't feel filled out enough to devastate. It won't likely haunt anyone for too long—except maybe theatrical exhibitors.

The filmmaking craft of "Beasts of No Nation" is vividly apparent, and its emotional power is undeniable. Why, then, does it feel dubious in certain ways, and perhaps troubling for the wrong reasons?

Fukunaga's staging of attacks and skirmishes is confidently measured—a raid on a surveying convoy being a particular standout—and yet he never gives the violence and gore any weight. The assorted montages of downtime among the Commandant's soldiers seem less like oases or counterpoints than like longueurs. One could claim that the film is meant to present a perspective desensitized to violence—but then what *is* the movie sensitive to, aside from tastefully composing widescreen in thirds?

Director-cinematographer Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, HBO's True Detective) alternates between documentary-style realism and passages of extreme stylization, and his multifaceted approach conveys the instability of the hero's existence. Idris Elba gives an intense performance as the boy's commanding officer and eventual father figure; his character comes across as monstrous at first but seems increasingly vulnerable as the story develops.

In the key of True Detective's first season, the entirety of which was helmed by Fukunaga, the muck of war is presented as a sort of demo reel, a programmatic rollcall of unspeakable frights made lurid by their self-conscious presentation. The film, then, is a stunt, though it coyly acknowledges itself as such.

Fukunaga's heart does not appear to be in the urban landscapes: It is in the wilds. In widescreen he captures its sensuality, multiple textures, and vibrant colors. It is gorgeous and seductive, the occasional close-up of an insect or a leaf, or shot of a moody sky, amplifying the breathtaking, nearly hallucinatory effect. Enhancing these rich images in a film in which visuals and music carry the story much more than dialogue is Dan Romer's eclectic score.

The film falls into something of a quagmire in its latter stages, as the third act surprise is that there isn't really a third act surprise... From production design to performances and choreography, Beasts of No Nation is a paragon of grim vibrancy. But where it brims over superficial drama, an original observation – something really scary – seldom finds its way to the screen.

Convincing in its portrayal of random slaughter and the drive it puts behind its narrative, Beasts suffers only slightly from being a latecomer to the child-soldier issue, already well explored in Johnny Mad Dog (2008) and War Witch (2012).