The Last Ranger: Terrible Lessons and a Legacy of Steadfast Effort in Poaching Drama

Cindy Lee’s The Last Ranger, loosely adapted from a true story, follows a ranger’s efforts to protect existing life while she also sets off the creation of the heir to her legacy. Carried by the performances of its actors, the film soundly accomplishes being deeply emotional—there will be tears—without being maudlin. 

The film brings to mind Toby Wosskow’s Sides of a Horn, sharing the subject and some of the narrative conflicts, but something else comes to life in Lee’s film through her dual heroines, Khuselwa, aka Khusi (Avumile Qongqo), and Litha (Liyabona Mroqoza). Khuselwa is the titular ranger, looking out for her rhinos at a time of vanished tourists and income. Litha, similarly afflicted, has no one to sell her father’s figurines to sell to. 

Writing credits are shared between David S. Lee, Darwin Shaw, and Will Hawkes. The plot courses a tumultuous day in their life as they unexpectedly—but with the casual tenderness of everyday affection—cross paths on their way to what work might come their way. Only, for Khusi, this tends to include dart guns and rifles. It starts out happily with a montage of the wilderness. Litha loves everything. Everything loves her back in the early morning light. The vitality of the music holds the sequence together. 

As Khusi almost instinctively begins to mentor the vivacious, “wild” Litha, the film blooms into its best part—watching, learning, exchanging the essence of being in the world. Mroqoza has a giant of a performer to share the screen with, so it is understandable that she might not always be the most remarkable in a scene: Qongqo is simply magnetic as the stoic Khusi. When Litha asks Khuselwa if she has any babies, her answer has all the burnished ferocity of a wild mother. 

Other characters complete the cast as a precise whole. Litha’s father (Makhaola Ndebele), drained dry of options and money; Khusi’s superior, Robert (David S. Lee), who similarly is stretched thin, if in different ways. Together, they are a set of characters variously contending with a harsh life made worse by covid. And together, they all have eyes on a rhinoceros, Thandi. It is a mark of the film’s merit that at no point does it lean towards cutesy human-animal bond shenanigans. Thandi is left to her devices, meant only to be watched over, with all the gravitas that is required of the duty. When it is sweet, it is with the steadying influence of Khusi and Qongqo. 

Things go wrong. Just about everything that could go wrong does. The last glimmer of hope has to claw its way out of the depths of utter bleakness. Litha’s violent coming of age is marked by dangers becoming too real in the final act, and requiring the mediating hand of Khusi’s camcorder. Strains of sheer tragedy and a different kind of poignancy emerge together. When there is nothing you can do to save the day, you can still document its ravages. 

Watch The Last Ranger Short Film Trailer