How ‘Beasts of No Nation’ Almost Killed Cary Fukunaga
There’s a moment near the halfway mark of the child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation where our young hero, an African preteen-turned-rebel-army-killing-machine named Agu, is being prepped for battle. An older boy pulls out a knife and cuts the youngster’s forehead; he then rubs a powdery substance into the gash. As the group’s leader, a charismatic destroyer of souls known simply as Commandant (played by The Wire‘s Idris Elba), leads them toward their destination, the visuals begin to change: plants take on a rusty blood-red hue, the earth they walk on looks sickly and tainted, the sky is a corpse-like metallic gray. Agu’s eyes seem confused at first, then seem to go completely dead as the film speeds up and stutters, and the carnage begins. He has crossed over to some unspeakable place that will allow him to do unspeakable things. And though we’ve already seen people commit acts that no sane, empathetic human being would rightfully do, this is the threshold point where we go from witnessing his nightmare to stepping right inside of it.
Mention this scene to Cary Fukunaga, the writer, director and cinematographer behind this harrowing sequence, and he’ll nod solemnly, staring down at a restaurant table he’s sitting at, right outside of the Toronto International Film Festival‘s headquarters. “When I was making Sin Nombre [his 2009 debut], I wouldn’t allow myself to do a sequence like that at all,” he says. “Tinting the color, changing the shutter speed, all that trickery…it felt like I’d be relying on using those things to create an emotional effect. I hadn’t earned it, I guess. But having done two projects that relied on classical filmmaking — ones that forced me to learn the tools of the trade, the way a 19th-century painter would hone a skill set — I knew this needed something different.” He looks up and narrows his eyes. “I mean, this is not a typical movie by any stretch of the imagination.”
That’s an understatement. From its long, hard conception to its take-no-prisoners storytelling — even down to its mode(s) of distribution, as Netflix will be releasing it in select theaters and on its streaming site on October 16th — Beasts of No Nation is anything but run-of-the-mill. Following one child’s journey through a living hell, Fukunaga’s labor-of-love adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel guides viewers from the peaceful, everyday life of a 12-year-old from an unidentified African country to his systematic desensitization and transformation into a killer of men. And though you could categorize this movie as one of numerous dramas that tackle contemporary global crises and take place on the continent, it’s as far from the usual Hollywood treatment of such issues as you could imagine. Other than Elba, there are no recognizable names in the cast. It’s visceral, you-are-there way of forcing viewers to experience Agu’s terror and moral free-fall offers no sentimentality or respite. And there’s no character a la Kevin Kline from Cry Freedom to hijack the story from a white-man’s perspective; the one moment you do see a white face appear, it’s passing in a van, shooting snapshots and driving in the opposite direction.