THIS CAGED BIRD IS BRUTAL
“Welcome to the world, boy, full of misery from top to bottom.”
These words of cheery optimism are uttered by Clare (an astonishing Aisling Franciosi), a young, Irish convict and indentured servant doing hard time as a maid for lascivious British lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) in the wilds of 1825 Tasmania, a penal colony then known by the more foreboding name of Van Diemen’s Land. Clare has good reason to have turned sour on the world. She has been exiled from her Irish home for some minor crime, shipped across the world, raped (twice) by her owner and his goons and seen her Irish husband and baby slaughtered in front of her.
That’s just in the first half-hour of Australian director Jennifer Kent’s brutal and harrowing raperevenge historical drama “The Nightingale,” a film that caused walkouts and denunciations at some film-festival screenings but also has picked up many honors, including three awards at the Venice Film Festival. It’s a tough watch, and many have pointed out that it’s a movie that should come with trigger warnings and distributor IFC has provided them, saying the film has “potentially triggering acts of sexual violence toward women, violence toward children, and violence motivated by racism.”
Simultaneously, it’s a masterful display of cinematic craft, an astonishing feat considering this is only her second feature, though her first — the eerie and more supernatural “The Babadook” from 2014, also about a woman in serious trouble — showed she was a talent to watch. Now, she’s delivering on that promise in unforgettable fashion with a horror film of a different sort, one steeped in the cruel realities of Australian colonialism.
Clare becomes consumed with revenge and has plans to stalk and kill Hawkins and his group of soldiers on their way to the town of Launceston where Hawkins has a meeting with his superiors about a possible promotion and transfer. He wants out of the Tasmanian backwoods as much as anyone.
But a neighbor convinces Clare that there’s no way she could survive the dangerous trek on her own. British soldiers and Aboriginal tribes are at war, and neither are likely to treat a lone Irish woman very well if they stumble across her. They recommend a guide and a tracker, a local indigenous man named Billy (an impressive Baykali Ganambarr in his first role), and she’s not too happy about it. Just because she’s treated like garbage by the British doesn’t mean she has any sympathy for indigenous peoples, who are also treated with contempt by the British, when they’re not being raped and murdered. And he’s not exactly thrilled about the prospect either, but she promises to pay him. (Not all the Brits are consciously evil, at least one soldier seems to have something resembling a conscience, though he doesn’t necessarily listen to it.)
And Clare and Billy do have something in common besides shared pain. She’s called “the Nightingale” because of her beautiful singing voice, and his spirit animal is the blackbird. But neither can fly away from their situation.
“The Nightingale” bears echoes of other films of struggle in untamed lands: the fervent anti-Australian colonialism of “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” in which a young 19th-century Aboriginal man goes on a revenge-fueled killing spree; the tracking narrative of “The Searchers,” the stormy malefemale bonding of “True Grit,” and the rage-filled survivor’s story of “The Revenant” (though we can be thankful there are no bears in Tasmania).
But Kent makes the story her own, giving it a feminist twist that might strike some as all too contemporary and simplistic. But Franciosi is so strong and the images so vivid and stirring that any heavy-handedness — as well as an ending that’s more of a whimper than a bang — is not as detrimental as it otherwise might be.
While an argument can be made that Kent didn’t have to be so explicit to get her point across, the violence feels less like a cheap stunt and more like a bracing emotional astringent that goes some way to making Clare and Billy’s lives palpably real in all their awful brutishness. Like the dense Tasmanian forest through which the characters travel, “The Nightingale” is not a journey for the faint of heart.