Movie Reaction: The Nightingale

Formula: The Revenant ^ Tasmania

At what point does a movie going from hard to watch to reveling in misery? The answer is different for each of us. We all have our own triggers and tolerance. For me, I can only deal with a certain level of violence and blood. I don't deal with wrist cutting or needles at all well. The only time I'm ever left a movie was when I nearly passed out watching The Evil Dead remake*. The Nightingale is the second closest I've come to walking out of a movie. It pushed right up against my tolerance.

*I legit went to the restroom and laid on the floor for a minute to regain myself. Thank god no one walked in at that point. That would've been awkward.

The Nightingale tells the story of Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish woman in the early 1800s sent to Tasmania for committing a crime. She's married with a newborn baby but needs to get her papers of freedom from the officer (Sam Claflin) in charge where she is.

I don't really understand the debtor system there. What's important is that she's done her time and should be free, but Lt. Haskins (Claflin) won't let her go. Then, one night, Haskins and some other officers do some really repugnant things to Clare before setting out for another town on the other end of the island. Clare hires a local tracker (Baykali Ganambarr) to catch up to them and get revenge.

Everything about the historical context of the movie I thought was tremendous. This is a period and place I know almost nothing about. It was fascinating to see what British Colonialism looked like there. I knew abstractly about the racial issues in other areas under British rule, but this movie makes it real and specific. The British treated the natives there just as inhumanely as they did in the U.S. Maybe even worse. This movie is rich with period detail. Everything feels lived-in and real. After watching this, I'm amazed that anyone managed to make it out of that time period alive. The movie doesn't shy away from the ugliness of the time. It's been a while since I heard dark-skinned people called "boy" this many times. The central relationship of the movie is Clare and her guide, Billy's, friendship, but it develops slowly and with a lot of resistance. It's not particularly wordy either, often letting the physical performances say the most.

I haven't seen Aisling Franciosi in anything but a small role in Game of Thrones before this, but you can add her to my list of British and Irish actresses who I'll see a movie with just to here them talk. She wears the brutality her character faces well. She plays the required hardening while still being vulnerable. Baykali Ganambarr is strikingly good for a screen debut. And, I have to give Sam Claflin credit for being so convincingly awful. His character is wholly irredeemable, and Claflin wears it confidently. He's not a cartoon villain. He's just a terrible human being.

If you can get past the first 20 minutes, this is a pretty good movie. Those first 20 minutes are rough though. Right around the second rape scene, I wanted to run out of the theater. I'm pretty done with filmmakers using rape as an inciting event*. Writing/Director Jennifer Kent really sits on those scenes and escalates them to unbearable levels. I don't think she does it in an exploitative way. She just really wants to make sure the audience connects with the horrors Clare faces and the reason she's hell-bent on revenge. It just goes on too long.

*At least it's better than if her rape was used as a male characters motivation.

The pacing of the movie can be a little sluggish, especially toward the end. It's kind of like the dog chasing the car who wouldn't know what to do if it ever caught the car. It's intentionally underwhelming. For anyone seeing this as Kent's follow up to The Babadook, prepare yourself for what kind of movie this is. It's a big pivot away from horror. A pivot that makes me more interested in her as a filmmaker but somewhat scared of the discomfort she's going to put me through next.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend