Stark Beasts of No Nation chronicles plight of Africa's boy soldiers

Where do tyrants come from? Are they born brutalizers, or are they products of their environment? Beasts of No Nation, a film based on Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala’s fictional 2005 debut novel by the same name, explores that question through the all-too-common tale of a brutal African warlord who contorts boys into beasts.

The Netflix-made film debuted Oct. 16 in theaters and online. While unrated, the film’s grisly war violence, language, and brief sexuality would make it R.

Fourteen-year-old Agu (newcomer Abraham Attah) narrates the story. He plays soccer with his friends and acts out kung fu movies behind the hollowed-out, wooden shell of an oversized TV set. But his innocence abruptly ends when government troops from his unnamed West African nation storm his village, killing neighbors and family members.

Agu barely escapes into the bush, where one of the country’s many rebel factions later captures him. An older fighter disparages Agu’s boyishness, but the commandant (Idris Elba) recognizes valuable human merchandise.

“A boy has hands to strangle and fingers to pull a trigger,” the commandant says with mock tenderness. “How can you say a boy is nothing?” The commandant forcibly conscripts Agu and other boys into his personal army. He controls his juvenile militia with rations of food, women, and narcotics. He manipulates them with anti-government propaganda, occult practices, and harsh discipline.

Beasts of No Nation offers no solutions to the crisis of child soldiers—there are at least 250,000 throughout the world, one source estimates. Instead, the film subtly repudiates what it claims doesn’t work. Education and Christianity appear feeble in the face of corruption and violence, and the film’s nearly total absence of white faces intimates Western disinterest in African strife.

Only once does the “civilized” world show up: In a brief scene, a handful of UN observers gaze out a Land Rover’s side windows as they drive past the commandant’s fighters, who are walking in the opposite direction. When the movie concludes, viewers are left to wonder if the boys who escape will recover the rest of their childhood or grow up to be mirror images of their captor.

Elba’s superb performance anchors this important story framed in gorgeous photography. But there was something forensic, almost detached, about Cary Fukunaga’s directing: I didn’t feel shock when Agu’s beloved older brother died, panic when he first marched into battle, dread when he held a machete to a man’s head. But perhaps after witnessing horror upon horror, like Agu suppressing grief and fear, I was simply trying to survive.