Kent’s follow-up, "The Nightingale," is a completely different sort of film, with its own kind of horrors, different horrors, that of the ravages of colonialism, its violence, rape and murder. Kent's capacious imagination and compassion drove "The Babadook," with its focus on a mother and son doing battle with a supernatural-style "intruder." The film worked on multiple levels, buzzing with potent ambivalent metaphors for grief, insomnia, parenting (especially single parenting, as well as parenting a so-called "difficult" child). It played for months here in New York, a rare occurrence for an indie film from a first-time writer/director. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.It's been five years since Jennifer Kent's debut film, " The Babadook," which quickly took its place as one of the most effective horror movies in recent memory. There are sentimental and reassuring movies about vengeance, and comforting stories about the resistance to historical oppression. This is a difficult movie because the questions it raises are not easy. We can’t look away from Clare, from what happens to her or what she sees. The screen is a tight almost-square, and Franciosi’s face often occupies it in confrontational close-up. The length of the movie can feel oppressive - the chase is grinding, its resolution repeatedly deferred - and Kent’s shooting style is deliberately claustrophobic. Though “The Nightingale” is an effective history lesson, it is even more powerful as an ethical inquiry into the consequences of violence and the nature of justice. But there isn’t much danger of misunderstanding. Occasionally they utter programmatic statements that seem meant to instruct the audience in the meaning of the ordeal we are witnessing. Their political education in the necessity of anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal resistance happens in fits and starts, and sometimes in ways that feel a little obvious. English is neither one’s mother tongue, which is both a sign and a source of potential solidarity. The long middle of the film switches back and forth between the unlikely hunters and their unwitting quarry, using their mishaps and chance encounters to cast a hard, sharp light on the racial, sexual and class violence that are central, in Kent’s account, to the founding of modern Australia.īilly and Clare slowly evolve toward an understanding of their common status as outsiders. Not that anyone would take them for a posse in pursuit of an officer and his retinue. She keeps him in the dark about the true purpose of their journey. For much of their journey, she addresses Billy as “boy,” treating him as a servant or worse even as her survival and sanity depend on him. (Hawkins, worried that his promotion is in jeopardy, is on his way there with several of his men.) She also hires an Aboriginal guide named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), since the trackless forests are too dense and dangerous for a white woman to navigate on her own.Ĭlare’s place in the Tasmanian social hierarchy places her above Billy just as surely as it ranks her below Hawkins and his soldiers, and she treats her new companion with high-handed, racist condescension. Without much hope of finding justice through official channels - a magistrate vaguely promises to file a report of some kind - she takes matters into her own hands, setting out for Launceston with a rifle and a horse. Part of her brilliance as a filmmaker lies in her mastery of the cinematic canons she subjects to thorough critical scourging.Ĭlare survives the attack and decides, against all reason and advice, to seek payback. But to say that Kent offers a revisionist take on traditional genres would be like calling “The Babadook,” her terrifying debut feature, a revisionist children’s movie. Its themes are justice, innocence and the boundary between barbarism and decency. It’s the tale of a wronged woman, and of white men in hostile territory. “The Nightingale” is a revenge story, one that draws on familiar Victorian Gothic and Hollywood western tropes. Jennifer Kent, who wrote and directed this rigorous, relentless film, surveys this landscape with clear-eyed fury. The soldiers, abused and humiliated by their superior officers, are also engaged in a brutal war of conquest with the Indigenous Tasmanians, referred to as “the blacks.” In the rough settlement where the movie begins, British soldiers rule over convicts who have been “transported” from England and Ireland. Nearly every human relationship is defined by domination and subjugation, a system of absolute violence organized under the banner of civilization and the British flag. Tasmania in the 1820s, as depicted in “The Nightingale,” is a ladder of cruelty.
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