The Nightingale review: rape, revenge, and the horrors buried in Australia's past
Dir: Jennifer Kent. Cast: Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman, Harry Greenwood, Ewen Leslie, Michael Sheasby. 18 cert, 136 mins
Jennifer Kent made such a bewitching debut with The Babadook that all eyes were on her next project – a hard-hitting frontier western about rape, revenge and ethnic cleansing in 1825 Tasmania, when it was the penal colony known as Van Diemen’s Land. Kent has stepped outdoors, roaming a bleak and blood-soaked terrain this time, in stark contrast to The Babadook’s chamber-piece intensity. And there’s nothing at all supernatural about the horrors in The Nightingale.
The Fall’s Aisling Franciosi plays Clare, an Irish convict working as a servant (and singer-on-demand) at a British Army barracks during the anti-Aboriginal Black War. She awaits a long-promised order of release, so she can live free with her husband (Michael Sheasby) and baby daughter. But Lt Hawkins (Sam Claflin), feeding his basest appetites while anticipating transfer to a captaincy elsewhere, is not the kind of man to make this easy.
Hawkins and two of his underlings, played by an unsavoury Damon Herriman and a freaked-out Harry Greenwood, inflict every nightmare imaginable on Clare and her family, in a bluntly horrifying scene of gang rape and double murder half an hour in, which Kent makes us face full-on, from Franciosi’s helpless point of view, in a grimy cabin. Clare emerges brutalised to within an inch of her life, but once the tears have dried, she’s reborn as a grim-visaged angel of vengeance with nothing left to lose.
Over the sprawling, exhausting 100-odd minutes that remain, she hunts down the culprits as they trek over hill and dale to the northern town of Launceston, where Hawkins is bound for his promotion. Her only ally is Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) an Aboriginal tracker who shares her loathing for the English without knowing the full cause of her suffering. When Clare catches up with her first, wounded quarry and bludgeons his face into an unrecognisable pulp, even Billy recognises a possibly more specific vendetta than your average pommie-bashing.
Hostilities between the British soldiers and the film’s other black characters flare up repeatedly, underlining the period’s routine abuses of power – a hapless character played by Magnolia Maymuru is gang-raped and gets no chance to avenge it. The burden of retribution is placed, symbolically, in the hands of Clare and Billy, who feel like heroes ahead of time, delivering a brand of counter-historical payback not dissimilar from Jamie Foxx’s cathartic sprees in Django Unchained.
Sunless and despairing, Kent’s style is much less gleeful than Tarantino’s, and she refuses to give the Devil the best lines: her villains aren’t flamboyant predators like his, but small, squalid men defined by rank opportunism. Her film’s intent – an exorcism of colonial brutality, on behalf of those who couldn’t escape it – is as obvious as its revenge-western template. And while it mostly succeeds at fusing these things, the emotional force of The Babadook is definitely missed.
Perhaps that film’s remarkable acting from Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman pushed it over the top. No one here lets the side down, but there’s not one performance you’d call inspired: Franciosi and Ganambarr do grit and grievance well enough, but the film doesn’t make their makeshift alliance soar.
The running time might suggest a rogue epic, bursting forth from generic constraints, but it shackles itself to mainly predictable outcomes. While she ruthlessly exposes the unexpiated atrocities in Australia’s past, Kent has smartly pillaged all the old horseback conventions to do her bidding. But she’s halfway stuck within them, too.
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