Shake Hands with the Devil (2007)

There's a moment in Shake Hands with the Devil where you realise that the most terrifying thing on screen isn't the violence. It's the silence from the people who could have stopped it. That feeling, of a man shouting into an empty room while the world casually turns the page, is what this film does best, and it does it without resorting to melodrama or manipulation. It just shows you what happened, and trusts you to be horrified.

This is part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, Rwanda's entry, and I won't pretend it was an easy watch. It shouldn't be. The film is based on the memoirs of Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, a man who was present for one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century and was, by the terms of his mandate, ordered to do almost nothing about it. Roy Dupuis plays Dallaire, and it's a performance that earns every quiet, agonising minute. There's no grandstanding here. No big Oscar-reel speeches. Just a man being slowly destroyed from the inside, the guilt and exhaustion visible in every frame. It's raw and it's real, and it's exactly the kind of performance that gets overlooked because it doesn't announce itself.

The film reportedly had Dallaire himself checking it line by line for accuracy, and you can feel that weight of authenticity throughout. This isn't a Hollywood dramatisation that smooths the edges and finds redemption in tidy places. The edges stay rough. The ending offers no comfort because there isn't any to offer.

What makes it especially effective is the restraint. The cinematography captures dread without wallowing in it, building an atmosphere of suffocating tension through stillness and shadow rather than spectacle. And the soundtrack, particularly the African vocal work woven through key scenes, is quietly devastating. It doesn't swell to tell you how to feel. It sits alongside the horror like a witness.

But I have to be honest about where the film struggles, because it does struggle. At nearly two hours, the pacing is slow, and not always in the considered, purposeful way. It circles the same emotional territory without quite finding new angles on it. The tension is present throughout, but it plateaus early and never really builds to a breaking point. In a way, that mirrors the real experience of Dallaire's mission, the awful, grinding stasis of watching catastrophe unfold while bureaucracy ties your hands. I understand why the film is structured that way. That doesn't stop it from feeling, at times, more like an obligation than a drama.

It reminded me a little of Josep, another film I've seen on this tour that deals with historical atrocity through restraint rather than bombast. Both films earn their weight not through what they show you but through what they refuse to let you look away from. Neither is easy watching. Both are worth your time.

There's a version of this story that a bigger studio could have made with a more famous face and a soaring third act about the triumph of the human spirit. I'm glad this isn't that film. Shake Hands with the Devil is more interested in truth than comfort, and more committed to memory than to entertainment. That's admirable. It also means it's a film you respect more than you enjoy, and whether that's a flaw or just the honest cost of the subject matter is something I'm still turning over.

Three and a half stars. Important, authentic, and genuinely moving in places. Just be ready to meet it on its own terms.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2025-08-28

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US

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