Agu lives with his family in a Catholic village, where he and his friends play and joke around. He has an older brother who loves muscles, girls, and dancing. Civil war looms and they decide to remove women and children from the village so that only the men can stay. Agu, who is a child, is not taken in by the driver who must take them elsewhere and in the excitement remains among the men. He witnesses the extermination of his family and takes refuge in the forest where he remains for days until he is captured by the army of the Commander, the leader of a group of young men and children trained in the most heinous warfare.

Indeed, he nurtures in them a spirit of revenge by training them to avenge the extermination of their families, identifying other groups as their enemies. A war that stretches across the continent and of which any reason is lost: on one side the army on the other the rebels.

A voice-over makes explicit the thoughts of Agu, who despite the atrocities he has to endure and perpetrate has a keen and watchful eye on the tragedy he is experiencing.

Ferocity, rape, mass killings, sexual abuse, and drugs, nothing is spared for these young boys, who are said to number more than 180,000 in Africa.

With a machete, which he can barely lift, can one induce a child to kill a fellow countryman who begs him not to, by repeatedly striking him in the head?

Fukunaga is unfazed by the horror he has to portray and coats the rebels' uniforms in refined aesthetic taste, making each wear a garment that looks like something out of a Stella Jean fashion show.

This is not meant to be a criticism, quite the contrary!

To represent horror with a beautiful dress is to invite it to look carefully, without looking away. Not only the color of flowing blood but the chromaticity of fabrics and accessories decorating murderous bodies denounce the ability of evil to disguise and seduce.

A documentary, the images on TV, the news report could never do what Fukunaga has managed to package: death makes itself beautiful and announces itself by arming the semi-innocent arms of a child with a gun.

Nothing is more surreal than a man committing murder, Bunuel said; nothing can restore form to a child decomposed by violence.

Abu knows that he cannot return to the child he was, and he knows that the only way to stop fighting is to die.

One does not get out of this vision unscathed: nothing is spared to us, in this violence that permeates sex and death even in a brothel.

The psychological invasion of images leaks that man can do nothing and yet can do everything.

With Fukunaga we take a journey into the underworld of the all too human inhuman; the film intends to disquiet the mechanical aspect of human lives, that meaningless pantomime that makes all that is unreflective silly.

The absurdity in these scenes becomes heartbreaking, and the human condition is humbled by it: man seems half to himself.

An immense cinematic work, where art sculpts denunciation and portrays human misery and senselessness.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice