The Last King of Scotland and the Lure of Power

In a single moment… you might end up a witness to a crime, or become part of it. Sometimes the only difference between the two is “how close you are to the wrong person.” A young man fresh out of his home country, a doctor with a curiosity for life, wanting to try everything new, travel, live an adventure, see the world from a different angle — that was the situation of the hero of The Last King of Scotland. A simple young Scottish man named Nicholas decided to leave everything behind and go to Uganda, a country just emerging from colonialism, full of hopeful energy, people dreaming, a nation trying to stand on its own feet. And here appears the man who’ll open the door to the whole story… Idi Amin… not just a president… a living model of what happens when power becomes an open-ended desire with no ceiling.

Their first meeting had something tempting about it… a leader who seemed simple in his speech, laughing, close to the people, fond of foreigners, especially this young man coming from abroad… Nicholas felt special, felt seen, felt valued… and that was the first thread in the whole game.

“The most dangerous thing about power… is that it doesn’t appear as a monster from the start… it comes disguised as an opportunity.”

Idi Amin wasn’t a typical dictator… he knew how to wear many masks… sometimes the caring father, sometimes the strong leader, sometimes the man defending his people against the world… and that’s what let him draw people in around him so easily. Nicholas started transforming… from an ordinary doctor… into an adviser very close to the president… entering his office, hearing his secrets, seeing his power from the inside… and here the mind starts playing its dangerous game.

A Functional Version of Stockholm Syndrome

Many of you have surely heard the term Stockholm syndrome… the idea, simply, is that a victim can sympathize with the person hurting them… try to understand them… make excuses for them… maybe even defend them. But what happened here goes a bit deeper… this isn’t a traditional kidnapping… it’s a “functional version” of the syndrome… you’re not tied up… you’re chosen, and that’s what makes the trap far more dangerous.

Nicholas started convincing himself that everything happening around him had an explanation… that this killing was “necessary”… that this violence was “a phase”… and that the man in front of him, whatever he did, had good intentions. Nicholas saw corpses… heard stories of torture… felt the fear in people’s eyes… and still… stayed. Why? Because the feeling inside him was stronger… the feeling of “I matter”… “I’m close to the center of decision-making”… “I’m different from everyone else.” And that’s exactly what power offers as temptation… not money… not just influence… but a feeling of being singled out.

When One Man’s Mood Becomes the Law

In the idea of “absolute will”… when one person’s desire becomes the law… his mood becomes justice… his decision becomes life and death.

That absolute will eventually turns on Nicholas himself, once Amin decides — correctly — that his trusted adviser has crossed a line with one of his wives and grows suspicious of his loyalty more broadly. The turn is swift and brutal: Nicholas is detained and tortured, hooks driven through his skin, in the film’s most visceral answer to everything it spent two hours building through charm and easy laughter. He only makes it out of the country because a Ugandan doctor he’d worked alongside sacrifices his own life to smuggle him onto a departing plane, a final, quiet correction to the idea that Nicholas was ever the one who mattered most in this story.

The film’s most legitimate criticism follows close behind that correction. Idi Amin’s regime is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of real Ugandans, and The Last King of Scotland tells that history largely through the eyes of a fictional Scottish doctor who wasn’t there, giving the audience an outsider to identify with rather than the people who actually lived and died under the regime. It’s a common complaint about films set during atrocities abroad, and a fair one here: Forest Whitaker’s performance as Amin carries the film’s power, but the camera keeps circling back to a white man’s proximity to horror rather than the horror itself.

Even with that limitation, the film’s central warning holds up on its own terms. Power rarely announces itself by looking dangerous. It looks like being chosen, being trusted, being let into the room everyone else is kept out of — and by the time the room turns out to be a cage, the person inside it has usually stayed for reasons that had very little to do with the man who locked the door. Nicholas isn’t unique in that respect. He’s just the version of the story that happened to get told, in a country and a decade where plenty of people made the identical calculation and never got a film made about how it ended for them.