The nature of Australian Westerns, in my experience, has been that they're always darker and more attuned to the cruelty of men than their American and Italian counterparts, but even by those standards, The Nightingale has a bleak view of humanity.
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What follows is almost like a parody of the traditional message movie boilerplate about two people from different races bonding due to their shared humanity Clare and Billy bond over the clarity and depth of their hate (one of the film's best scenes finds them cursing out the English in their respective native languages at a campfire), and their relationship is more like a pair of combat veterans than it's ever friendly. After the scene in which this all happens was done playing out, I supposed that the film couldn't possibly do anything more appalling and apocalyptic in its unblinking depiction of human depravity, and I was perhaps right that nothing is more appalling than this scene, though this scene is most certainly equaled.įrom here, for the rest of its exhausting136 minutes, the film follows as Clare, turned into a vessel for pure rage, chases Hawkins across the island with the help of an Aboriginal guide named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) who openly disdains and mocks the racist white woman he's now traveling with. This goes poorly, but just how poorly is more than the Carrolls expected: by the end of the day, Aidan and the baby are both dead, and Clare has been raped for the second time in 24 hours and left for dead by Hawkins and his two most trusted goons, Ruse (Damon Herriman) and Jago (Harry Greenwood).
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The next day, Aidan - suspecting the crime but promising Clare that he won't make waves, very calmly asks Hawkins to please sign the papers and free his wife. He has no intention of doing this, of course, and when she brings the topic up at a regimental party, he rapes her. She's also married to Aidan (Michael Sheasby), and has an infant daughter by him they're all three waiting for Hawkins to make good on his promise to set her free, a promise already months overdue. Somewhere along the line, she was purchased as an indentured servant by Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), commander of a crappy little unit that's not good for much besides getting drunk and wildly firing their rifles at Aboriginal tribespeople. Here, we meet Clare Carroll (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict sent to the Australian penal colony to rot for her unnamed sin. It is, rather, a revenge thriller Western, set in Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s right after that island became an independent Australian state, and well before it was ever renamed Tasmania.
There's not much of that domestic chamber horror picture in The Nightingale, except that both films demonstrate an exquisite ability to press a viewer's buttons while the new film is certainly horrifying, it's not the same thing as horror. Kent, as I hope you recall, is the filmmaker who exploded into the world with her 2014 feature debut The Babadook, and I am certainly not the only person who has been waiting with great greedy hunger to see what she'd be up to next. I will not fight anybody who thinks this is an altogether wrong approach, but it's certainly a committed choice and having made the choice, writer-director Jennifer Kent executes it with aplomb.
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This is a movie full of rage at the way men treat women, the way white people treat brown people, and the inherent bloody-mindedness of imperialism, and it communicates that rage by trying to drown us in misery. The film is designed to put us in a face-to-face confrontation - or, more like, nose-to-shit - with the brutality and cruelty of history, giving us none of the nice distance that a lot of movies with social messages use, as a way of cossetting their viewer. And this is clearly what The Nightingale intended to do, so I don't even mean for this come off as sarcasm. If you consider (as I do) that the first mission of art is to trigger an emotional response in the person who receives that art, then mission accomplished. Any film as enervating as The Nightingale must be doing something right: it is one of the most upsetting, unpleasant, grueling films I have watched all year, and this is not something that happens without effort.
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