Tuesday 6 October 2015

Beasts of No Nation (Cary Fukunaga, 2015)


BEASTS OF NO NATIONS
Director: Cary Fukunaga; USA, 2015
Reviewed by Kiomars Vejdani

The film is from the point of view of a small boy in an unnamed war-torn African country. Director Cary Fukunaga has created an infernal atmosphere where chaos and cruelty rules and human life has lost its value. In this nightmarish setting he takes us through the emotional odyssey of its protagonist. We watch the boy's transformation from an innocent and carefree childhood (in the extremely funny scene of "imagination TV") to horror of watching his father and brother being killed, desperation and misery of being left alone and unprotected, to joining the rebel group and becoming a killing machine shooting anyone considered enemy without getting upset or giving it any thought. In the end when he is taken out of war zone and put in a boy's camp we see him reverting to normal boyhood playing with the others on the beach. But how much of his childhood innocence has been lost we can not tell for sure, as such an experience is bound to leave some deep scars on his soul. The film is a powerful drama of loss of human values.

No comments:

Post a Comment