‘Beasts of No Nation’ Gets an ‘A’ from Indiewire

Venice Review: Cary Joji Fukunaga’s ‘Beasts Of No Nation’ Starring Idris Elba

Indiewire – Sept. 2, 2015

By Jessica Kiang

Surely one of the most beautiful films about ultimate ugliness ever, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s immersive and profoundly moving “Beasts of No Nation” is a hollowing experience — it reaches in and scoops you out, piece by piece, until all that’s left is a cavernous shame at being a person who lives in a world where this story can happen. In this it is exactly the film that needed to be made about the ultimate degradation of morality represented by the practise of turning children into soldiers, and exactly the film that Uzodinma Iweala’s remarkable novel deserved to inspire. Matching Fukunaga’s proven storytelling grace with a story truly worth the telling, the result is explosively authentic and yet lyrical, making an utterly inhumane and alien situation both completely real and completely abstract. It becomes the cumulative anguish of so many similar stories (our press notes suggest there are anything from 250,000 to 500,000 child soldiers in existence right now) distilled into one small boy. And the battleground is not just the dilapidated towns and jungles of his unnamed African home, but the far more valuable and vast territory of his soul. Read more here.