Review: The Nightingale

The tone of convict movies can usually be guessed by their location; the further from Sydney you get, the grimmer they are. And by the time you hit Van Diemen’s Land, you know you’re in serious trouble; if anyone ever makes a convict movie set further south than Hobart, they'll basically just be throwing buckets of blood at the camera from scene one.

And so it proves with The Nightingale, a bracing rape-revenge tale that’s often hard to take even for seasoned genre fans. The year is 1825, and former convict Clare (Aisling Franciosi) is being regularly raped by Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), leader of the local military garrison in the southern wilds of Van Diemen's Land. When her husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) finally speaks out about the injustice of what's going on, the results are bad news all around.

Hawkins, his 2IC sergeant Ruse (Damon Herriman) and a small group of men head north through the wilderness; Clare enlists the help of tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to help her catch them. What starts out as a chase soon develops into something a bit more complicated, as various agendas clash and revenge turns out to be a bit messier than initially thought. 

At first this film – the second from Jennifer Kent, writer-director of The Babadook – is both brutal and relatively straightforward. It’s not until the third act that things start to lose their focus, which muddies the waters in ways that aren’t always to the film’s benefit. For a film about a chase through the wilderness, there sure do seem to be a lot of people hanging around the bush; when the isolation of some of the characters is presented as a death threat later on, it's hard to take seriously (and rightly so; they get out of it relatively easily). 

The much discussed brutality of the multiple rape scenes is in keeping with the film’s setting, and the characters are nuanced enough that this never feels purely exploitative. Unfortunately, what exactly is being said here never comes clear either. It wants to be bigger than mere revenge at times; at others it's fully behind bloodshed, but only for some characters. It never comes apart, but the ever-widening scope of the film occasionally seems to spin the story beyond Kent's control; this film is at its sharpest when its at its most shocking.

- Anthony Morris