The biggest news surrounding "Beasts of No Nations" is that it very well could change the distribution of the film industry as we know it. With the film, Netflix has marked its territory releasing the film on its digital platform yet supplying it in sufficient theaters to be eligible for an Oscar run.

Yet the bigger story should be about how terrific a film it is and represents the best of director Cary Joji Fukunaga's output.

Set in Africa in the midst of a civil strife, the film follows Agu (Abraham Attah) as his entire family is ripped from him (his mother and younger siblings flee as refugees while his father and older brother are murdered), forcing him to flee. He runs into the National Defense Force, headed by Commandant (Idris Elba). Under Commandant, Agu transforms from an innocent buy trying to sell "imagination TV" to people and fooling around doing "child things" into a murderous soldier. At the heart of the film is the horror of watching children manipulated and used for the atrocities of war.

Our first image of the film is seen through some frame -- in the distance children are engaged in an activity in a dry field. Agu's voiceover gives us a sense of calm and repose. We see the disheveled village he lives in, but his introductions of his family members are filled with joy and humor.

But as the framing of the opening shot might tell us, this is all a mirage.

Before long however the film does a complete reversal transforming into an explicitly violent exhibition where no crime or murder is safe from being depicted onscreen. At one point in the middle of the film, Agu and a force enter an abandoned house and go about destroying everything. Fukunaga, who also works as the cinematographer here, records the action in one long take, keeping us close to Agu as he goes through a series of conflicting emotions. Initially he is uninterested, robotically knocking everything down that he can find. When a woman is found in a closet, he runs to her, clinging to her and calling her his mother. It is a moment of desperation from the character that had seemingly been phased out by his "training." Then Agu realizes that he has been delirious, rejects the woman and moves about the space looking at the murder of another child. At the climax of it all, he opts for murder of his "mother" as she is being raped by other soldiers. At the tail end of this painful sequence, Agu's voiceover questions what God would think about his behavior.

The voiceover presents Fukunaga with an opportunity to meditate on the themes of war and the corruption of children. It is through this vehicle that he can sidestep these issues through conversation and instead let the images interact with Agu's innocent but yearning inner monologue.

Attah delivers a tremendous performance as Agu. Cherish the few smiles he emanates in the early going because they quickly disappear, never to return again. The transformation for Agu is truly physical in many ways. His dancing in the early scenes, his snappy dialogue, his searching gaze are all a part of who he is when we first meet him. But as the film unfolds, he becomes stiffer, more robotic, his face growing less expression, his gaze locking away his inner fears and thoughts. He is a completely changed person. At the end of the film, when he is being questioned about his experience, the boy is the epitome of a tomb, his body clearly alive, but his frozen posture and rigid stare suggest that a part of this boy is very much dead.

Elba is likely to draw a great deal of accolades for his performance as the charismatic Commandant. He is a vicious man yet hides his nature behind a suave facade. He makes the audiences like him even if through forceful charm. As we see him come into greater conflict and his own power is tested, then the feral beast comes to the fore in the most frightening of ways. That said, one must applaud Elba and Fukunaga for never pushing the fury or temperament too far, saving the violence for the viewer's imagination and keeping him all the more frightening.

If the opening image of "Beasts of No Nation" is framed as illusion, the final image, which essentially bookends the story with a similar image explored through a more promising element, tells us that there is hope. Or at the very least the film seems to be hoping for some hope.

After said experience, one could only be left to wonder as the film itself acknowledges, through Agu's voiceover, that some may never truly know the horrors without experiencing firsthand.