A numbingly violent and overlong tale of revenge and retribution during colonial era Australia, The Nightingale features director Jennifer Kent stretching her abilities as a filmmaker yet coming up short as a storyteller, resulting in a brutal slog of a film that suffocates under its heavy themes and how it presents them.
It is common that films depicting colonial-era Australia only allow the horror of that time be the focus. Historical fact is reason enough for this creative decision, and with Australia relatively young as a country the wounds of the past are very much felt in the present. Much like the rest of the world, the 1800s was not a good time for a lot of people, especially those of colour and women. The Nightingale director Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) wants to remind Australians especially of this, which she does with the blunt force trauma of a sledgehammer. The result is a lifeless corpse of a film, beaten senseless by its aggressive messaging and the means in which it dispatches it.
Set in Tasmania 1825 (then known as Van Diemen’s Land), The Nightingale stars Aisling Franciosi as Clare, an Irish convict kept under the thumb of British officer Hawkins (Sam Claflin). One night in a drunken rage Hawkins and two of his men (Damon Herriman and Harry Greenwood) barge into Clare’s hut. They rape her, and then kill her husband (Michael Sheasby) and baby daughter before departing for a new post. A distraught Clare, seeking bloody revenge, enlists the help of indigenous tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to guide her through an unforgiving wilderness.
Kent frontloads the brutal violence of The Nightingale within the first 30 minutes of the films 2 hour plus runtime, setting the tone for an uncompromising journey through a dark, barbarous world where racist and sexist attitudes were common place and murderous. Yet she does so with such redundant aggression that it mires rather than enhances the themes Kent tries in vein to convey, as key messages get lost in a thick fog of violence for violence sake. Brutal violence can be an effective way to sell a movie’s themes. There is a fine though line between 12 Years a Slave and A Serbian Film. That the violence of The Nightingale belongs more to the latter is a failure on Kent’s part.
At 136 minutes The Nightingale proves to be too long, plodding along with a sluggish pace leading to the next eventual scene of brutality. If there was ever a movie that needed a quicker pace to distract its audience from reminiscing on its brutal violence, The Nightingale would be it. Performances are a mixed bag. Aisling Franciosi delivers a brave turn as the physically and psychologically battered wife and mother seeking bloody retribution from those who have wronged her. Even better is newcomer Baykali Ganambarr as the tracker who witnesses the wanton, barbaric destruction of his people from the “bastard English” who claimed his people’s lands as their own. Sam Claflin is one-note as the films villain, a British officer strawman representative of every colonial-ere nightmare story read in the pages of Australian history.
Unbeknownst to Kent, Hawkins is also representative of The Nightingale as a whole: brutal, unrelenting, and more interested in presenting itself as a film of importance rather than proving to be one. Better films have handled this kind of material. Seek those out instead.
