Beasts of No Nation is not a film to be seen lightly. It will not warm your heart, or lift your spirits. But it should be seen. Because it reminds us of where evil comes from in the world.

The story opens with Agu, a young African boy playing “imagination TV” with his friends, looking through the empty frame of a television set at the world around them. It’s both a perfect way to set up the character as playful and innocent, and a deft metaphor for what the movie itself is trying to do. We’re looking through a frame at reality. The frame might focus our attention on one thing over another, but this is really happening somewhere out there, beyond the safety of our television screens.

Agu lives a happy life with a happy family, but there are rumblings of trouble in the distance. Soldiers patrol his seemingly peaceful town, and his father talks of a fighting force on the move toward their home.

And all too soon, the war is no longer a hypothetical thing happening out of sight, it is real and present, gunshots and explosions tearing through Agu’s old life and sending him on the run into the bush.

Out in the wild, Agu stumbles across a contingent of men led by the charismatic Preacher. They recruit Agu into their fighting force with the promise of revenge against the men who attacked his village. They put a gun in his hand. They teach him to kill. They teach him to hate.

Agu becomes a soldier, in every possible sense of the word. He joins in the murders and atrocities perpetrated by his company with an almost religious fervor. And yet he is still just a little boy, who longs to escape from the endless horror of war to go and do little boy things once again.

With Beasts of No Nation, director Cary Jo Fukunaga once again proves his considerable talent, but aside from one or two notable exceptions, there is not an overabundance of style in the film. This story is rough and brutish and true, and Fukunaga wisely avoids using too many directorial flourishes that might detract from the weight of what is happening on screen.

Likewise the performances from Idris Elba and child actor Emmanuel Affadzi are heartbreakingly real. In particular Elba’s portrayal of Preacher, a character who could have easily been a caricature of a villain, is instead terrifyingly human, yet another somber reminder that the evil men of the world are still men. And those men were once boys who played and laughed and loved and were loved.

Beasts of No Nation is a hard movie to watch, but it’s message is critical. Ultimately it is not only a tale of child soldiers in Africa, but a warning to people of every country and in every time.

Evil is learned. Hatred is taught. But love and good can be taught as well.





Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw .

To hear more of our thoughts on Beasts of No Nation check out Episode 166 of the Human Echoes Podcast.