The Nightingale: Filming the past, negotiating the present

In her essay on The Nightingale, horror nerd and researcher Lauren Stephenson looks at confronting unpopular yet vital histories.

"Welcome to the world - full of misery from top to bottom."

Clare (Aisling Franciosi), The Nightingale

For years, we have witnessed women’s fight for survival on screen. The woman who suffers is, and has been, an essential cinematic ‘trope’ that transcends generic, geographic and industrial boundaries. That said, within the rape-revenge narrative, the woman who suffers is particularly, and spectacularly, commonplace. Bodies brutalised, minds frayed, these women have fought hard, only to be neatly contained within a set of narratives almost wholly informed by the experiences, preferences and attitudes of male creatives. Notorious titles such as Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave(1978), Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981) and even Wes Craven’s canonised The Last House on the Left (1972), have all given male writers and directors the last word on women’s trauma. In recent years, however, a shift in these narratives has occurred, something Claire Henry identifies in her book, Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre, exemplified by the cycle of films she terms ‘revisionist rape-revenge’. Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) could be considered as one such film, but should it? One cannot help but see parallels between the film’s fearless confrontation of sexual assault, and the very recent revelations regarding the ongoing and historical abuses against women, brought to light through social movements such as the #MeToo and the Time’s Up campaigns. However, this parallel may have led to blind spots, both in Kent’s filmmaking and in understandings of the film’s political message. Unflinching, brutal and profoundly difficult to watch, The Nightingale wrests the narrative from the grip of patriarchal control, attempting to reframe trauma through the intersectional lens of gender, race and socio-economic class – but who does this narrative really belong to?

Upon its release, The Nightingale was greeted with both praise and controversy on the festival circuit. Whilst some critics commended Kent’s fearless filmmaking, for others, the unrelenting violence of the film’s narrative proved too much. In June 2019, audience members at the Sydney Film Festival screening walked out of the film en masse in response to its punishing portrayal of sexual assault and violence. A year earlier, at a screening of the film at Venice Film Festival, Kent was heckled by an irate male critic who, with no hint of irony, subjected the director to a barrage of threatening sexist slurs. This controversy was perhaps compounded by the success and popularity of Kent’s last feature, The Babadook (2014), which no doubt informed many a viewer’s expectations going into The Nightingale. In crafting The Nightingale, Kent disposes with the dark humour and expressionist aesthetic that so clearly resonated with the audiences of its predecessor. Indeed, excepting the occasional dream sequence, Kent has shifted filmic register entirely for this new offering. The Nightingale employs an oppressively tight screen ratio (historic Academy aspect, 1.37:1), and the landscape is foregrounded here, taking on a folk horror-esque presence, imbued with a history and tradition not fully understood by those crossing its boundaries. The colour palette is limited to cold greens and blues, and the entire film is underpinned by a melancholy fusion of Irish folk and Indigenous song.

The film, set in 1820s Tasmania (known at the time as Van Diemen’s Land), follows a young Irish convict woman, Clare (Aisling Franciosi), who has been sentenced to a period of servitude to a British Lieutenant, Hawkins (Sam Claflin), in penance for undisclosed crimes. She has married and had a child whilst fulfilling her sentence, and now dreams of a different life, away from the abuses of Hawkins, who rapes Clare within the first few minutes of the film. By plunging us into a brutal scene so early in the film, Kent immediately sets the tone, and irrevocably casts Hawkins as the personification of European colonial violence. To him, Clare is just another conquest – her body there to be colonised in similarly violent ways to the land he stands upon. The violation of Clare’s body is a both a brutal, individual, human act and an allusion toward far deeper human injustices, namely the violation of Australia’s native lands and peoples by colonial forces. The intersection of these two acts of masculine violence and violation underpin the entirety of the film. Clare’s husband later confronts Hawkins to demand he release her. The confrontation soon escalates to violence, and Hawkins is left humiliated in front of a senior officer. In retaliation for this humiliation, Hawkins and two of his soldiers invade Clare’s home and enact unspeakable violence upon her, her husband and, eventually, her child. These multiple acts of violence leave Clare with nothing but rage and an appetite for vengeance. Clare enlists the help of a young Aboriginal man, Billy, to guide her through the bush in pursuit of her attackers. The remainder of the film follows Clare and Billy as she seeks vengeance and he justice for the violences they have each endured at the hands of colonising forces.

Despite this narrative trajectory bearing multiple similarities to the rape-revenge genre, Kent is insistent that The Nightingale is not a rape-revenge film, but rather an historical drama. However, this rejection of rape-revenge discounts the potential for hybridity that is characteristic of the genre and, in some ways, it also undermines, for me, one of the film’s biggest triumphs – Kent’s simultaneous challenge to the approved narratives of genre cinema and of history, through her reconstruction and repositioning of the people and events often neglected by both. Both genre cinema (in this case rape-revenge) and history are exposed as colonised spaces, each dominated by a patriarchal narrative that excuses then reinforces the superiority of the coloniser whilst removing selfhood and identity from the colonised. The film does not revise the rape-revenge film so much as it reclaims it for the woman who suffers, in order to fundamentally shift the narrative away from masculine mythmaking and spectacle. There is, therefore, great value in assessing The Nightingale as both rape-revenge and historical drama, in order to fully explore the radical extent of Kent’s pivot away from the strictures of traditional rape-revenge cinema, towards a revenge narrative that offers something entirely new.

Kent’s reticence to categorise the film as rape-revenge is understandable; the genre has historically been understood as deeply regressive and exploitative, and Kent intends to humanise, not exploit, her characters. And the truth is, whilst this film contains multiple violent scenes, its treatment of violence is completely atypical of rape-revenge, even the ‘revisionist’ efforts of recent years. Scenes of Clare’s rape centre not on the assault, or her body under assault, but on her face. This violence is not graphic in the dehumanising, perhaps even titillating, way that we have come to expect in rape-revenge films, but it is emotionally graphic. We connect with Clare on an individual, human level. We cannot disavow or ignore her humanity whilst looking her in the eye. Kent, with Clare’s face filling the screen, allows no space for the audience to distance themselves from this violence. Clare’s face, staring out into the audience as the assault continues, makes the audience complicit in the violence, and serves to humanise Clare as both victim and survivor. This focus on the face persists throughout, with both Clare and Billy periodically staring through the fourth wall, placing the audience in the deeply disturbing position of having to confront multiple violences as historical fact. Not only this, but Kent confronts the viewer with their own consumption practices, and condemns the unquestioning acceptance of dominant narratives. This focus on faces is incredibly important when contextualising the film, its genre and its relationship to violence, as critic Tara Judah writes, “The faces she [Kent] asks us to face are hurt, enraged and wronged. Facing them is not controversial, it is confronting.” Perhaps the outrage the film received is not wholly in response to the presence of sexual assault throughout the film, but is, rather, a response to Kent’s audacity in showing said assaults as a human reality, outside of the reassuring confines typically provided by the spectacle and titillation of horror and/or rape-revenge. The film crosses boundaries not normally crossed in an historical drama, and the refusal to move the camera away from scenes of rape, murder and infanticide stakes, as critic Andrew Lapin comments, “a new benchmark for acceptability in cinematic depictions of historical atrocity.”  In an era defined by conflicting resurgences of both feminist activism and masculinist politics, The Nightingale offers an incisive critical commentary on the precarity of women’s existence, the fragility of men’s dominance and the legacy of colonial violence. Furthermore, it addresses and accuses the audience directly of being complicit in the creation and perpetuation of various forms of oppression. 

However, whilst the film’s engagement with Clare’s abuse and oppression speaks convincingly to current discussions of gendered power and privilege, the film encounters problems in its attempts to intersect gender and race. Clare’s hired guide, Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Aboriginal tracker, is subjected to vitriol and abuse from Clare for the majority of the film (she spends most of her time walking behind him, a loaded gun aimed and held to the back of his head). Clare is initially hateful and mistrustful of Billy, but tensions between the two ease as they gradually reveal their traumas to one another. But it is this conflation of Billy’s and Clare’s experiences of colonial brutality that becomes more contentious as the film wears on. Billy becomes deeply invested in Clare’s quest for revenge, to so great an extent that he willingly sacrifices himself so that Clare can realise her goal. By the end of the narrative, Billy has exacted revenge upon Hawkins, murdering him in his bed. However, in this act of climactic vengeance, Billy is also badly wounded, and his survival seems unlikely in the final scene of the film. For critic Sesali Bowen, the way that the film frames the relationship between Billy and Clare reveals a damaging yet all too prevalent trope, “Even though Clare got her vengeance, Billy likely died – off-screen – from the wounds he sustained seeking vengeance for Clare, showing the way that people of colour have been used as a means to an end for white woman’s ascendance. It's troubling that Kent uses the trauma endured by Australia's Aboriginal people to tell the story of a white woman—all the more so because their story is not Kent's to tell.” When connecting this back to contemporary contexts, it is telling that this film first provoked, for me, parallels with the 2017 #MeToo movement; a milestone movement towards women’s safety and equality, but one which has nonetheless been criticised as one which co-opted, then ‘whitewashed’, Tarana Burke’s ongoing movement of the same name, whose intention was to support and advocate on the behalf of victims of sexual abuse, primarily Black women and women of colour. There are limits to a white feminist lens, and The Nightingalefalls victim to those limits, despite Kent’s good intentions and her diligent approach to researching and understanding the film’s subject matter. Kent regularly consulted with Aboriginal elder Jim Everett, one of the film’s associate producers, and was also in contact with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Commission during filming. She went to great lengths to ensure that her representation of Indigenous peoples and cultures was authentic and respectful. Kent was clearly aware of her privileged position and gaze in telling this story, and took steps to inform herself about the histories and cultures she was portraying. The limit here, then, is more to do with Kent’s occasional uncritical use of deeply harmful narrative devices which privilege the white gaze and white characters, undermining the work she does to challenge harmful narratives elsewhere in the film.

For example, the visibility, or invisibility, of Aboriginal trauma is further compounded by Kent’s treatment of the film’s third rape scene, this time the assault is against an Indigenous woman, Lowanna (Magnolia Maymuru). Unlike the unflinching focus and condemnation afforded to the scenes of Clare’s rape, the rape and subsequent enslavement of Lowanna by Hawkins and his men seems to fall back into the troubling pattern of female rape as a tool for male narrative advancement. This third act of rape seems to be present in the narrative as a reminder of soldiers’ depravity, pivoting away from the female victim towards the narrative advancement of male characters. Where Clare’s rape is shown as both a personal trauma and a broader allusion to acts of violation, Lowanna’s rape is reduced purely to metaphorical status, with minimising and dehumanising results. For writer Larissa Behrendt, the film’s treatment of Lowanna shows the limits of Kent’s understanding, “For a film so focused on colonial violence against women, the perfunctory and superficial interrogation of how that dynamic plays out for Aboriginal women is a serious flaw that plays into a colonial cinematic tradition.” Kent herself reflects; “One way to look at the world is, ‘If I turn away from all the suffering, it doesn’t exist’… The other way is to look at it boldly in the face, and let it into your head, and see how it feels…” Unfortunately, it feels, at times, as though Kent herself has, literally and figuratively, turned away from Indigenous suffering at times in the narrative when it would have mattered most to look. The film’s critical reception is further testament to how the film has struggled to maintain its challenge to dominant narratives. In several responses to The Nightingale, Clare’s rape is explicitly referenced and criticised, where Lowanna’s rape is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. Whilst Kent cannot be held responsible for the film’s reception, the anonymity and invisibility of Lowanna in such responses seems to demonstrate that, at the very least, Kent has failed to challenge the dominant narrative on this occasion.  In failing to ‘look boldly’ into the face of Indigenous trauma, and instead filming platitudes about similarities of oppression, Kent has also failed to confront the audience with this trauma. Whilst Kent demonstrates an awareness of Clare’s privileged whiteness, her confrontation with colonial history within the film is the beginning of a broader conversation, not the final word.

The Nightingale does do important work, confronting unpopular yet vital histories, and forcing the audience to acknowledge their own complicity in the suppression of such histories. In this current moment, this confrontation seems more vital than ever. It also reclaims the rape-revenge narrative, reframing the woman who suffers as the woman who survives. Revisionist rape-revenge “challenges the ethics of violent responses to rape… [but] brutal climactic scenes of revenge remain core”, as Clare Henry writes, and Billy’s final act of revenge does not work as much-needed catharsis, nor as what Henry calls the ‘key generic pleasure’ in an otherwise deeply uncomfortable and unenjoyable film. This act of revenge works to disempower, rather than empower, both Clare and Billy. Billy is seemingly mortally wounded and has sacrificed himself for the realisation of Clare’s goal, and Clare, trapped between the soldiers and the sea, is left at the very peripheries of the society she once hoped to join. The cycle of violence continue unabated, because the death of one Lieutenant cannot topple the oppressive system under which both characters have suffered. Kent’s film has its triumphs and its failings, but its central message to the audience is clear – the battle is not over, it is just beginning.

Lauren Stephenson is a Horror fan, Film researcher and academic living in York, UK. She currently teaches on the Film and Media Studies programme at York St. John University and researches in the areas of Horror cinema and Gender Studies. She has recently contributed to edited collections on Gender and Contemporary Horror Television, writing on the British TV show Dead Set (2008), and The Modern Gothic, writing on the ‘hoodie horror’ film cycle. She has also contributed a short piece on filmmaker Coralie Fargeat for the Cut-Throat Women Database. In her spare time, Lauren indulges in good food, good horror movies, and mostly okay true crime documentaries. 

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