High Marks for Beasts of No Nation Reviewed in Venice

Senior critic for one of the two trade papers, THR’s Todd McCarthy, has seen Cary Fukunaga’s eagerly anticipated Beasts of No Nation. McCarthy gives it a great review, writing:

One of the most impressive things about Beasts is that it was able to be made at all, and with such verisimilitude. Shot mostly outdoors in Ghana, the action moves around a great deal and there are several large-scale scenes of troops moving into ever-bigger towns, skirmishes, battles and mass evacuations that obviously presented major logistical challenges. Given the country’s lack of much filmmaking infrastructure or a history of hosting big international productions, what’s ended up onscreen is very impressive, and Fukunaga’s camerawork is — as in his earlier films — lustrous and alert without falling back onto mere hand-held exigencies.

Central to the film’s power and success are the two lead performances. How a child actor could be coached to reveal and project the enormous range of reactions and emotions required for the role of Agu is practically unimaginable, but Attah is persuasive and true and constantly interesting to watch as a boy forced to endure extremes of experience to be wished on no one. The film would not have been worth making without a capable kid at its center, and the director found him.

Starting out with what could have been a cliched figure of a charismatic egotist lording over a bunch of helpless youngsters, Elba keeps revealing more and more layers of his troubled character, to the point where the Commandant begins to assume Shakespearean proportions as a Macbeth-like figure who may not really have what it takes to be a completely successful and enduring despot. The actor keeps pushing his characterization further and further to the rather surprising end, never taking the easy way.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gives the film four out of five stars:

Director Cary Fukunaga has handled projects as diverse as the migrant drama Sin Nombre, a Jane Eyre adaptation with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, and episodes of TV’s True Detective. This film, premiering at the Venice film festival, is his best film yet.

Fukunaga brings flair, muscular storytelling, directness and a persuasively epic sweep to this brutal, heartrending movie about child soldiers and a civil war in an imaginary West African country, based on the 2005 novel by Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala.

It is a tale of fear, degradation and abusive dysfunction – a violent and disorientating nightmare with a shiver of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Idris Elba gives an outstanding performance as a charismatic and sinister warlord who finds that military power, however intoxicating, is subject to the fickle imperatives of politics, and the suit-wearing opportunists in the cities far from the country badlands he has come to rule.

AwardsDaily will be catching Beasts of No Nation when it screens here at Telluride in the coming days.