Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 07.17.25
★★½ 2.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight approaches the fall of Rhodesia and rise of ZANU-PF through a young white girl’s limited perspective, which may be faithful to memoir but leaves the adults around her superficial and the politics almost entirely unexplained. We learn little about what Black or white communities believed, how the conflict operated or what roles these people played within it. I wanted this unfamiliar viewpoint to illuminate history; instead, the child irritated me and the narrowness drained a momentous transition of urgency. Fidelity to a child’s understanding may explain the omissions, but it does not make them dramatically interesting.
Full review — contains spoilers
I wanted to like this more. I'm interested in the subject matter and in seeing it from a different POV. But I just found the little kid annoying and the characterizations of the adults around her, very superficial. There is little insight here on what the whites or blacks were thinking or feeling during this period. No exposition about the politics involved or details regarding the armed conflicts and roles the adults were playing. I get that this was based on a true story from the young white girl's POV, so maybe we don't get more insight than she had at that time, which is fair if it's true to her experience, but it's ultimately just a bit boring. How do you make the fall of Rhodesia and the rise of ZANU-PF boring?