‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: A Ghostly, Ghastly Tale of Growing Up During an African Civil War | Telluride

Alexandra Fuller’s award-winning memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight gets cinematic treatment, courtesy of first-time writer/director Embeth Davidtz, who also stars in the film. The film, which just had its world premiere at the 51st Telluride Film Festival, follows eight-year-old Bobo as she ambles around her Rhodesian farm surrounded by violence, death, and destruction. It is a guttural, sad film about innocence lost and losing innocence, both a passion project and a passionate story that is soon to stick with audiences past the credits rolling.

The movie is set in 1980, when the Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) government of Robert Mugabe is on the cusp of electoral victory after years of apartheid and white colonialism. Bobo, played marvelously by young actress Lexi Venter in a touching and fierce performance, lives in rural Rhodesia—on the verge of becoming Zimbabwe—with her alcoholic, combative mother Nicola (Davidtz), her absent father Tim (Rob Van Vuuren), and her Manyika caregiver Sarah (Zikhona Bali). Violence permeates, her parents sleeping hugging machine guns that they flail liberally, and horrific scenes of infanticide and murder on an endless TV loop, as war engulfs the southern African nation.

Since Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is told from Bobo’s perspective, we catch only glimpses of what she understands and sees, though we are able to infuse additional meaning to the racial slurs, the disdainful hiss of the word “communist,” and the furtive glances that surround her. Bobo is afraid of ghosts, particularly of tales of dead children that come back to life, and of death itself and the so-called armed local “terrorists” that dole it out. Through her innocent but honest fears, we, too, become afraid and apprehensive at what dangers could lurk around the film’s next corner.

Davidtz’s script unfolds slowly and methodically, revealing little morsels of what life was like for these people, and it does not minimize or eroticize anyone’s suffering. Bobo’s mother Nicola is arguably the saddest, most tragic character, clinging unflinchingly to her farm, to the land she thinks belongs to her because she has seeded it with her own blood and tears. Sarah is also a central figure, one whose kindness towards Bobo could cost her dearly, and whose parable about the separation of man from God haunts Bobo’s dreams as much as the real tragedies she has endured in her still young life. The male characters are far more two-dimensional, grunting, drinking, pissing, putting themselves where they do not belong, and of course, killing. This is a decidedly female-focused story, with the bravest of them all perhaps the little girl at the center of the story.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is, at times, a difficult to watch tale about the loss of innocence. Bobo at her young age has seen more anguish than most adults endure in a lifetime, let alone any child. That she is able to continue to play games with other children, to fantasize about mythical queens, and to have an imagination, is both beautiful and tragic. More on the tragic side are the inherited idioms of oppression and racism that she is unwittingly inheriting from her parents. The world around her is tremendously cruel, and it seems impossible that she could escape that.

South African cinematographer Willie Nel suffuses the entire film with an ethereal, dreamlike quality. The terrain is dark red—with blood, a character in the film Blood Diamond would tell you. The wind blows it up constantly, burning everyone’s skin. There is never complete clarity or light. It is as if Bobo is perpetually dreaming, though the dreams she does have are horrendous memories, worse than nightmares. Little Lexi Venter’s and the rest of the cast’s makeup is similarly impressive, darkening their eyes and polluting their features. In many ways, they live in squalor, dirt, and broken fragments of objects that represent long-gone memories. It is only through Nicola’s drunken rants that one can even begin to fathom why a family would even fight to keep a land like this.

Aside from the impressive nature of its technical values considering what is clearly a low production budget, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is interesting for its similarities and differences from stories with which it shares narrative edges. There is an Empire of the Sun element to it, the story of a child who is essentially abandoned by their parents and made to grow up in a series of tragic, shocking moments. There are also elements of other colonialism and genocide films like Hotel Rwanda. At the same time, there are few films quite like this one, few that come to mind about this particularly horrific chapter in human history, the dawn of the Mugabe dictatorship, and none that tell it from this memorable perspective. This unique perspective lifts the story to a memorability it would not otherwise have.

By the end of its two-hour runtime, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight  leaves a lasting mark. The inherently likable but also suffering little girl at the center of the film is that powerful. The film does not reach for cinematic heights, nor does it purport to tell you much about the origin or solutions to the problems of hatred and violence it portrays. It is a simple, personal story, but one that somehow feels universal.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2024 Telluride Film Festival and does not currently have U.S. distribution.