As Clare and Billy encounter grim reminders of the effects of colonialism, their initially fractious and hostile relationship gives way to an uneasy understanding of one another. Their journey is perilous, harrowing, and illuminating as Clare and Billy encounter slavers, lascivious men, and all manner of unforeseen environmental challenges. Guided by a young Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), Clare embarks upon a journey which she may well not survive. After suffering an unthinkable tragedy and enduring nauseating sexual and physical violence, Clare sets off into the bush to pursue Hawkins (Sam Claflin), the vicious English officer who put her through hell. Without spoiling anything, The Nightingale tells the story of Clare (Aisling Fanciosi), a young Irish convict who is serving her sentence on a military base in the remote reaches of Tasmania. However, what happens during those beautifully shot scenes of Tasmania’s gorgeous natural landscape will more than likely make your stomach churn. Shot on location in Tasmania, the film is a sumptuous visual feast thanks to Radek Ladczuk’s stunning cinematography. Set in colonial Tasmania in 1825, The Nightingale is an uncompromising work of historical fiction that breaks your heart, numbs your senses, and slowly brings back to a hopeful equilibrium. Unflinching, unrelenting, and fiercely unapologetic, The Nightingale is history stripped of varnish, a story that will leave you feeling queasy, exhausted, but ultimately heartened by its tale of vengeance, survival, and grief. Perhaps serendipitously, the film made its Sundance debut on Australia Day, a national holiday that celebrates the day Australia was founded, and has been dubbed “Invasion Day” by those who mark it as the beginning of the devastation of Aboriginal culture. Rather, it’s meant to be an accurate depiction of the very real horrors that colonialism wrought on Tasmania.
The Nightingale is a film of many extremes–violence, racism, misogyny, rage, misery-but it is never meant to be gratuitous. For her follow-up to 2014’s The Babadook, Jennifer Kent chose to explore a decidedly different type of horror, one rooted in the history of her homeland. I don’t think I’ve seen a crowd leaving a theater that stunned and silent since 2013’s 12 Years a Slave. Before audiences screened the North American premiere of Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, senior programmer Charlie Sextro warned the crowd that “it’s a tough watch.” That may have been the understatement of the year.
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