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| Photo © Coco Van Oppens |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
There are films about Africa that come clad in soft-focus nostalgia, and then there is Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Actor Embeth Davidtz’s directorial debut adapts Alexandra Fuller’s searing memoir of a childhood spent amid Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’s dying gasp, but this is no rose-tinted memory piece. Instead, Davidtz delivers a film so physically and morally grimy that it peels the varnish off the genre entirely.
Set in 1980, at the cusp of Robert Mugabe’s rise to power, the film follows young Bobo Fuller (played by first-time actor Lexi Venter in a staggering performance) as she roams her family’s collapsing farm with the heedless abandon only children possess. Around her, everything is rotting: her mother’s sanity, the colonial system her family depends upon, and the very notion that they have any rightful claim to this place. But Bobo, muddy and barefoot, remains blissfully unaware of the tides of history churning beneath her.
It is this unawareness that Davidtz weaponizes so effectively. She wrote many drafts of the screenplay before realizing the only truthful perspective was that of a child, and it shows. We never leave Bobo’s line of sight, even as it limits us. She repeats her parents’ offhand bigotries without understanding them, waves to armed militants as though they were neighbours, and frames every terror – landmines, snakes, home invaders – as another curiosity in her sunbaked world. Her ignorance is not innocence. It is a learned cruelty.
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| Photo © Coco Van Oppens |
Davidtz, who herself grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, understands this cruelty intimately. As Bobo’s mother Nicola, she is incandescent with brittle fury. Nicola’s despair – her alcohol-soaked rages, her clinging to guns and bagpipe music as the land slips from her grasp – is neither softened nor judged. There is a haunting authenticity in the way Davidtz plays her own mother figure: a woman unraveling under grief, racism, and thwarted entitlement, clinging to the only thing that anchors her identity – the land itself.
Nicola is not a sympathetic character, but in Davidtz’s hands, she is human, in all her vile contradictions. A scene in which she machine-guns a kitchen snake before calmly demanding tea from her Black servant Sarah (a luminous Zikhona Bali) is as revealing as it is revolting. Later, her violence turns humanward in a scene so laden with colonial horror that it leaves the viewer trembling. Davidtz has spoken about filming such scenes with her majority-Black South African crew, acknowledging the weight of historical trauma carried by every person present. The film feels carved from that reckoning.
Yet despite the savage clarity of Nicola’s portrait, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is Bobo’s story. Lexi Venter is a revelation, untainted by child-actor artifice. With her unwashed hair, dirt-caked feet, and gap-toothed grin, she is the feral child Alexandra Fuller once described herself as. Davidtz deliberately withheld the script’s darker moments from her to preserve the guilelessness essential to the performance, and it pays off. Venter’s Bobo is all instinct, unfiltered mimicry, and animal curiosity. She casually hopes she doesn’t die in a landmine today with the same lilt she might ask for breakfast.
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| Photo © Coco Van Oppens |
Around her spins a supporting cast rich with unsaid truths. Anina Reed, as Bobo’s teenage sister Vanessa, plays the girl’s suffocated yearning with aching restraint. Bali’s Sarah becomes the film’s moral core, radiating care for the neglected child even as her own life teeters in danger. Willie Nel’s cinematography turns the farm into a horror landscape, with stalkerish tracking shots and binocular-eyed zooms framing the Fullers as perpetual prey.
Davidtz’s directorial hand is confident but never showy. She resists the seductive grandeur of African vistas. Instead, her camera lingers on decay: rusted water tanks, unwashed hair, bloodstained floors. The Fuller farm is no idyllic Out of Africa retreat; it is crumbling infrastructure propped up by violence. Even her color palette – adjusted to achieve what she called a desperate “more green” Zimbabwean hue – never tips into lush romance. As Fuller herself put it, this is the “anti-Out of Africa,” and Davidtz understood that assignment to its bones.
Some flourishes are heavy-handed, like the clanging church bells punctuating a plot climax despite their unlikelihood in that isolated bush. But Davidtz earns such theatrics with an atmosphere so taut that each sonic jolt lands like artillery fire. The soundtrack, a blend of Zimbabwean psych-rock, Roger Whittaker croons, and jarringly serene Scottish bagpipes, unsettles and roots the viewer in place simultaneously.
Critics may debate the film’s political stance. While Fuller’s memoir largely sidestepped the wider implications of white settler colonialism, Davidtz leans into it, depicting the Fullers as their own species of tragic grotesques, fumbling for dignity as the world they pillaged reclaims itself. It is an unflinching gaze, and some will find its refusal to grant them redemption unsparing. Others will argue it is too merciful, allowing us to see the Fullers’ heartbreak even as their privilege rots.
But perhaps that is the film’s quiet power: refusing to simplify. Davidtz told Fuller’s story not to absolve or condemn but to bear witness to a childhood formed in the shadows of violent entitlement. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight eaves its viewer raw, haunted, and strangely grateful – grateful for a filmmaker who understands that truth is not always symmetrical, and that sometimes all art can do is illuminate the rot we refuse to see.
As Bobo smokes a purloined cigarette, legs dangling off a farmhouse porch stained with unspoken crimes, we see a child perched on the lip of history, destined to tumble forward into a world she cannot yet imagine. Davidtz’s film gives her no false illusions of safety, nor does it grant us the comfort of distance. Instead, it forces us to sit with the unsettling reality of who owned what, who paid for it, and whose feet – unwashed, unclaimed,
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