Renegade tribesmen and bandits abound, and the two must count on each other to survive. She hires Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to serve as her “tracker” who can facilitate her safe passage through the wilderness. In the first act of the film, Clare finds herself in need of a native guide to travel through this dangerous landscape to a larger town that is days away from her small agrarian community. It’s a time of civil unrest when the expression “raping and pillaging” is a daily reality and not a historical description.Īisling Franciosi ( Game of Thrones) plays Clare, an Irish ex-convict with a husband and a baby. Substitute Native Americans for the Aborigines, and it’s a similar lawless environment. If not for the Australian accents and geography, you could mistake the setting for the American West. The British and the ex-cons agree on one thing: they’re superior to “the blacks”. The former inmates look down on the native tribes. There’s a societal pecking order: British ruling class, British civilian class, former inmates, natives. You may be “free” from confinement, but you really aren’t free upon being released. Many of the ex-cons are treated as property by their British overseers. Prisoners from England, Scotland, and Ireland serve their sentences and find themselves trapped thousands of miles away from home when they are released. The British have subjugated many of the local aboriginal tribes. The country is a penal colony under British imperial rule. So, I’ll limit my summary of The Nightingale to a description of its setting. Is it a spoiler to reveal there are spoilers in the first 20 minutes of a film? Online cinephiles can debate that point, but I think that takes things a little too far. For a movie that’s 2 hours and 20 minutes, you would think I could summarize the first 15 to 20 minutes without ruining the experience. The Nightingale rewards viewers who are blank slates as they enter the theater. The less you know about the details of this film the better. I try to tell my readers just enough for them to get the “feel” of a film while leaving out the precise plot details to the greatest extent possible. I always pride myself on steering clear of spoilers in my reviews. My faith in Jennifer Kent was well placed. It was one of my most eagerly anticipated releases of 2019, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Some films land on my personal Must See list based solely on film-making pedigree, and this is one of them. It’s the new film from Jennifer Kent, the writer-director behind the 2014 break-out horror hit The Babadook, and that’s all I needed to know. I went into my screening of The Nightingale knowing as little as possible about its plot. Australian Writer-Director Jennifer Kent Follows Up The Babadook With A Sophomore Stunner

Nightingale movie