‘The Nightingale’ soars as devastating tale of brutality
Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent of the critically acclaimed “The Babadook” leaps to the front ranks of world cinema with her devastating follow-up effort “The Nightingale.”
It is just as much a horror film as her previous effort. But it is about the horrors of Australian genocidal history and indentured servitude and the ghosts and demons haunting that nation and its artists today.
The film has roots in both revenge movies and in such New Wave Australian classics as “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” (1978). Kent’s film is a violent portrait ultimately of our power to transcend violence. “The Nightingale” is disturbingly awful to watch at times because it does not shy away from the horrors of rape and graphically realistic murder and the effect those crimes have on audiences.
At first, Kent focuses on one person, a convict Irishwoman in 19th century Tasmania named Clare Carroll (the amazing Aisling Franciosi of “Game of Thrones”). Clare is a beautiful orphan girl with an infant daughter and a kind Irish husband. The trouble is that Clare is the “property” of psychotic English Lieutenant Hawkins
(Sam Claflin), who rapes her in opening scenes after she has sung the song “The Nightingale” for a crowd of leering, “tosspot” soldiers. Clare tries to hide the attack from her blacksmith husband, but in short order he and the baby are killed by Hawkins and his soldiers. Soon Clare is in the woods, trailing the lieutenant and his fellow criminal soldiers, Sgt. Ruse (Damon Herriman) and a young, repentant infantryman named Jago (Harry Greenwood), who killed the baby. To guide her in the deep, almost trackless, Tasmanian interior, Clare hires an aboriginal young man named Billy (a revelatory, award-winning Baykali Ganambarr), aka Blackbird.
For her part, she has a rifle and a horse. It’s the nightingale and the blackbird against the soldiers of British Empire, and soon Clare and Billy learn they have things in common, most of all wanting to rid their respective countries of the murderous, thieving English. In scenes recalling the recently deceased Nicolas Roeg’s groundbreaking classic “Walkabout” (1971), Billy shows Clare how to travel and collect food in the wilderness. First rule of the woods: Avoid men with guns.
The cinematography and mobile camerawork of Radek Ladczuk (“The Babadook”) is one of the film’s crucial elements, a constant reminder of the resonant beauty of Tasmanian countryside in spite of all the bloodshed and brutality we see. At night, Clare has “Babadook”-like dream visions of her dead husband and baby and her attackers. Billy performs a “smoke ceremony” over Clare to dispel bad spirits, and she undergoes several baptisms, one in blood. Meanwhile, Hawkins and Ruse capture a beautiful aboriginal woman and brutalize her, and the pattern of misogynistic sexual abuse goes on.
Later in the film, Billy and Clare encounter white men with aboriginal captives in chains, suggesting an Australian variation of “12 Years a Slave.” One horrific scene reminds me of something Hitchcock once said about how hard it is to kill a human being. In a departure from his leading man roles, Claflin is very convincing as a colonial-era rapist/serial killer. But the film belongs to Franciosi, who sings beautifully in several scenes, and Ganambarr, whose aboriginal rebel almost steals the movie.
(“The Nightingale” contains extreme violence, rape and profanity.)