The Nightingale 2018

[9.0/10] There’s a select group of movies -- ones like Requiem for a Dream, The Road, and Hereditary -- that are extraordinary achievements in filmmaking and artistry, but which I never, ever want to see again. The Nightingale instantly joins that distinguished collection, a gripping, affecting, lingering film that you will wish, perhaps, didn’t linger so long.

I don’t know if I would recommend this movie to anyone. At most, I might say that if you have an iron stomach, it has well-drawn characters, an effective premise, and brilliantly constructed scenes. But I would also warn people that at various points it will make you want to crawl into a hole and die. That is, I take it, by design -- an escalation of the sort of too real misery director Jennifer Kent put on display in her outstanding debut feature, The Babadook. It is also, however, a lot to take.

It’s telling that within the movie’s first ten minutes, there is a rape, and having been warned by similarly wearied travelers that this one gets pretty dark, you say to yourself, “that was distressing, but totally stomachable,” only to realize, to your horror, that it was just the appetizer. The follow-up sequence, where the embittered lieutenant, denied the promotion he believes he deserves after his superior officer witnesses his libertine ways, takes his frustrations out on Clare, our protagonist, and her family. The ensuing nightmare of rape, murder, and infanticide is enough to where even an inveterate “see it through” completionist like me would fault no soul on this earth for turning off the movie and giving up.

But if that were it, as utterly horrible and borderline unwatchable as that sequence is, I could maybe warn people that there’s an incredibly rough scene to get through, but that things become manageable from there. The Nightingale is a revenge movie, one where, as in films like Kill Bill and The Revenant and even much slighter action fare like John Wick, the film needs you to feel its protagonist’s righteous anger, in order to earn the catharsis of their eventually vengeance. After witnessing such callous brutality, it is hard not to want to see the lieutenant and those who aided him suffer their just deserts almost as much as Clare does.

Unfortunately, the movie does not stop there. What follows is a cavalcade of cruelty and murder. Clare herself and her “blackfella” guide and eventually comrade and confidante, Billy, are subject to shortage of further horrors on their quest to bring the lieutenant to justice. Apart from them, the movie depicts the deaths and degradation of mothers, children, “guides”, prisoners, indigenous peoples, ensigns, and basically anyone and anything whom a British man with a gun and a sense of entitlement can designate as “the other.”

I wish I could call this surfeit of violence and stomach-churning debasement indulgent or excessive. It is harrowing; it is stark, but it is not pointless or frivolous. Kent and her team make the audience feel every blood-chilling echo of colonialism, of racism, of misogyny, of othering, in order to make the picture’s implicit condemnation as visceral and unavoidable as humanly possible. This is not a rank “gore for gore sake” movie, or torture porn like Hostel or, god help me, even the overextended dose of cruely of Audition. Each unwatchable moment is in service of the same purpose, the same overriding message, of the dignity and basic humanity denied of oppressed peoples of all stripes whose only sin is being born to a race or station where those with power consider them property.

Kent still has her horror bonafides, so she also shows us Clare falling asleep, and seeing intermixed images of her dead husband and daughter dancing and welcoming her to the afterlife, alongside ghastly images of the people she and others have killed, haunting or chasing her, a reminder of what she is both trying to exorcise in her determined, furious search for revenge, and also of what she’s lost and been turned into through the callousness and disregard of others. Kent still knows how to compose a scene for maximum fright, with close ups on faces and flashed together iconography of the dead to chill the soul.

And yet, if there’s a hint of something optimistic amid this cinematic pile of death and misery, it’s the notion that there can be understanding and camaraderie and equality and even mutual support among the oppressed. One of the harshest things to swallow about The Nightingale is the way the lieutenant, a self-entitled villain among villains, tries to make others complicit in his unspeakable acts, forcing subordinate officers and child convicts and anyone within his power to take part in his horrid deeds, encouraging those under his thumb to turn on and blame one another rather than train their weapons or their ire upon the source of their pain and the one who actually deserves it.

Despite such deplorable egging on, and divisions of race and class that persist even among those mutually ground under the bootheel of the English gentlemen, Clare and Billy find common cause, friendship, and mutual trust. Though one is Irish and one is aboriginal, they each sing the songs of their people; they each resent the British overlords who debase them and make their lives hell; they each mourn those lost amid such casual cruelty, and they both yearn to return to a home that their oppressors have, in one way or another, robbed them of. Through such common struggles, the distance between them shrinks, the bonds between them strengthen, and by the end of the film, the two are part of the same, crossing the separations of language and culture and race and disdain in the shadow of a shared yearning for justice and freedom.

Kent gives them similar symbolism to represent that connection. Each looks to the sky, through the trees, up to a pallid moon or a rising sun, asking without words what god would allow such miseries to be enacted against them, and hinting that, perhaps, in the end, a better may come. She contrasts Clare as the titular nightingale with Billy as a local blackbird, each representing their spirits and their spiritual desire to escape this place and this life.

There is grand catharsis in that, in Clare stomping on the lieutenant’s career on behalf of her spouse and child before Billy sends a spear through his heart for the genocide of his people. There is something heartening about the moment when Clare slips her hand into Billy’s, the culmination of her moving closer and closer to him, psychologically and literally over the course of their travels, and he assures her that they are in a good safe place. There is relief as both stare out onto a sunrise over a shoreline horizon, having come so far and done what they came to do, albeit at a terrible price.

I just wish the path to get there hadn’t made me want to shower for days and hug my loved ones until they burst and watch nothing but Disney movies for a year to get the film’s harshest events and images out of my head. Those disquieting sequences exist for a reason. They convey, in a way nothing else could, the sheer hubris and barbarism among those who hold themselves above others for supposedly being civilized, and the terrible wrongs committed against so many in the name of an unjust system of power and oppression. The Nightingale, like its protagonist, achieves what it sets out to do. I just never want to see it do it again.