Ella Christiansen
Amidst a brutal press tour where filmmakers behind IFC’s 2018 film The Nightingale were poked, prodded, and pushed to defend their employment of sexual violence in the film, the team stood tall in defense of their vision. Lead actress, 25-year-old Aisling Franciosi became emotional speaking about the rightfully-visceral toll of her film’s rape scenes arguing “They’re difficult to watch but any scenes of sexual violence – if they’re not difficult to watch, there’s something wrong,” (AP Archive 1:37). The Nightingale subverts the rape-revenge subgenre with the awareness that such depictions of sexual violence have long been a contentious issue for survivors and female filmgoers alike. This 1970s exploitation horror subgenre uses rape as a brutal and titillating inciting incident to justify a violent comeuppance on behalf of survivors, coalescing around plot formulas that “...exploit sexual violence, follow it up with murder, and still claim the moral high ground,” (Hess). Morphing from an arthouse impetus in Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring to exploitation thrillers like The Last House on the Left then back to the arthouse again with Oscar-winning Thelma and Louise, the respectability and explicitness of such films vary greatly. While this perverse horror subgenre slipped from run-down cinemas to ran-through sketchy pornography sites, a cohort of female filmmakers including Australian indie darling Jennifer Kent emerged across genres in the early 2010s with more vast creative control than before. Kent’s 2018 film The Nightingale weaponizes the conventions of rape-revenge cinema to expose the horrors of gendered colonialist violence by refusing to sexualize explicit assault scenes, demonstrating the complicated ubiquity of misogyny, illustrating the emotional toll of violent revenge, advocating for catharsis via embodied speech, and positioning solidarity-based friendships as a liberating future on the horizon.
The Nightingale slots neatly into what Clare Henry deems a ‘revisionist rape-revenge’ film in her book of the same name because of Kent’s refusal to use formal techniques to sexualize assault. She writes that ‘revisionism’ serves as ‘a catch-all term’ to define the self-conscious characteristics of late-stage films and to explore “...the various ways of reworking, refining, or reinstating the genre’s codes and conventions.” Kent primarily employs a revisionist gaze by desexualizing explicit imagery of assaults and illustrating the ubiquity of gender-based violence beyond what makes for a convenient hero’s journey. The film’s antagonist, a British colonial soldier Hawkins, assaults an Irish convict under his care twice, the protagonist Clare, and assaults an aboriginal woman named Lowanna once. Such antagonists straddle the line between man and monster much as this subversive film straddles the line between drama and horror. “The Nightingale may stray far away from the horror genre she worked so expertly in her debut — but that’s not to say there’s no babadook in it.” (Lodge). During these scenes, Kent prefers realism and emotional honesty, focusing on faces in close up rather than bodies in long shots. The first time Hawkins assaults Clare best exemplifies Kent’s potential to command a gentle gaze amidst a brutal situation. Where films like I Spit on Your Grave strip their female characters and frame shots to capture assaults with a caliber of physical honesty that is often re-uploaded to pornographic sites, Kent ensures her survivors are fully clothed, showing hands unlacing a dress rather than skin on skin (Kent 10:48). She then inserts isolated reaction shots, primarily forcing the audience to sit with Clare’s pain (Kent 10:49) (Kent 11:00). Hawkins raping Lowanna is similarly confined to a low-lit close up and reaction shot. However, the film’s modesty dissolves as an unfortunate consequence of the framing. The camera looks down at Lowanna over Hawkins’ shoulder, making the audience an accomplice in Hawkins’ violent gaze. Despite errors in positioning, this forced perspective (for lack of a better term) illustrates the subgenre’s strides away from salaciously sexualizing survivors. Kent “...examined other rape scenes and always found them potentially titillating. Showing women’s naked bodies and wide shots really objectifying a woman but for me, it was really important to stay within her heart and mind. If you look at those scenes, they’re really just faces,” (AP Archive 2:06). I Spit on Your Grave is
a prime example as the iconography “...is the scantily clad, blood-soaked female avenger made iconic through the poster. This can be considered rape-revenge’s presold concept, or the reduction of the genre down to a saleable image,” (Henry 28). Conversely, The Nightingale’s primary posters use drab colors and emphasize Kent’s former work on The Babadook to presell the film. Kent’s decision to clothe, flatten, and desexualize the film’s iconography rejects the saleable image of ‘rape-revenge’ by destabilizing the fantasy of the empowered sexy survivor and leaning into the horror of the experience.
Unlike classic films within this subgenre, Kent’s film also decenters individual
assaults, clarifying Clare’s rampage as a broader feminist-motivated search for vengeance than a small-stakes personal vendetta. In the opening ten minutes of the film, men whistle and leer at Clare as she prepares to sing, standing tall in center frame as the men’s heads bob about out of focus in the lower half of the screen. Her space is encroached upon by men despite her best efforts to maintain her dignity and stand tall (Kent 4:52). They flick their tongues and laugh at her as she serves them drinks and she flicks back... flicks their drinks over that is (Kent 5:55). These casual instances of misogyny cumulate, frustrating the audience alongside Clare. Armed with this indignance, she confronts Hawkins and demands her freedom sputtering out that “I’m meant to be in the care of my husband now. It’s the law” a compromisingly misogynist plea for freedom to choose which man possesses her rather than to possess herself. Hawkins rebuffs her request nonetheless and enraged, rapes her (Kent 9:20). By highlighting the omnipresence of gendered violence, Kent blurs the tidy depiction of rape as a flatly violent and rectifiable offense.
The horrific and cyclical nature of violence is most cogently articulated in the film’s nightmare sequences where Clare wanders about the dark wilderness alone, hearing a child’s cries, Hawkins’ screams, and the British travelers’ song which Hawkins forces her to sing for his troops. Delirious, she chuckles, spinning into a delusional dance. Her dance grows more frantic as she sees Aidan, their baby, and lynched Aboriginal men (Kent 1:38:34). As the fiddle’s sound grows more atonal, Jago joins her dance and Clare is horrified to see his face
smashed to bits from her vengeful murder. The music ratchets up as Ruse and Hawkins fill Jago’s place in succession, causing Clare to scream and flee. Given Hawkins assaulted her and her family in darkness, in darkness these repressed horrors resurface, manifesting in PTSD nightmares. “The Nightingale looks at what happens after revenge is exacted, and the toll it takes when you try to rid yourself of pain by inflicting it on others,” (Buckley). Kent's perspective on revenge does not vary greatly from classic rape-revenge films of the 1970s like The Hills Have Eyes and Miss .45 where avengers express no joy or satisfaction in the brutality that they inflict. Of I Spit on Your Grave, iconic theorist Carol Clover insightfully notes that there is no “...discernible “joy” in the revenge section; Jennifer goes about the business of catching and murdering her assailants almost impassively,” (Clover 119).
Clare finds revenge despite killing neither of her rapists. After Hawkins and Ruse abduct and assault Lowanna, a group of indigenous people attack in her defense, injuring Lago. Clare catches the injured soldier in the woods and stabs him through the chest until her arms are sore. This penetration brings her no gratification. She immediately pivots towards pleading for Billy to stay with her and breaks down in tears (Kent 1:11:13). Rather than kill Hawkins, Clare embarrasses him before his superiors, singing defiantly in a pub mirroring how he forced her to sing earlier in the film. “If maleness caused the crime, then maleness will suffer the punishment,” (Clover 123). Hawkins’ maleness is not reduced to his phallus like I Spit on Your Grave, rather his pride is ripe for castration. Clare silences men in the room, “You can tell me to shut up. You can threaten me. But it won't do nothing. That girl you raped, whose husband and baby you murdered - that girl died. And you can't kill what's already dead,” (Kent 1:59:00). Unlike rape-revenge films Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Ms. 45 which explicitly strip their protagonists of their voices, Kent embodies Clare to, not only speak, but sing like a nightingale freely, underscoring the unproductive nature of revenge when liberation is the end goal.
Unlike films like I Spit on Your Grave or The Last House on the Left, after her attack, Clare is not set on a color-by-numbers hero’s journey on account of a singular violent act. The Nightingale varies from other films within the subgenre in that Clare is privy to the mundane horrors of gendered violence long before the murders (notably not an isolated assault) that set her on her journey. Clare’s hunt for revenge is functionally a suicide attempt as she has nothing to live for without any human connections. She embarks on a quest for retribution at all costs, enlisting an aboriginal tracker named Mangana. She begins the film just as cruelly racist towards Mangana as Hawkins. Just as Mangana wears the name ‘Billy’ to protect himself, Clare dons the story that she embarked on this journey in search of her husband. As ‘Billy’ becomes Blackbird, embracing the Palawa Kani meaning of his name and Clare embraces her hunt for freedom, the two bond, commiserate, and discuss the beauty in each other’s colonized cultures. This relationship serves as the emotional core of the film as they need the survival their connection brings far more than they could ever want revenge. The major difference between these classic rape-revenge films and Kent's revisionist iteration is that Jennifer Kent provides a solution, or something akin to one, by illustrating the solace, care, and freedom Mangana and Clare find in their friendship. Ending the film with the robust saturation of the first sunrise visible thus far, Clare’s rapist humiliated, and the man who facilitated genocide against Mangana’s people murdered, they stare into the warm horizon. Mangana sings to the morning sun in Palawa Kani and Clare sings in Gaelic. This sunrise calls back to all of the portraits of the moon nestled against dark trees, one of which was intercut as a reverse shot during the first sequence where Hawkins rapes Clare (Kent 11:37). These images of distraught skies come from the point of view of a bird yearning for escape, for liberation and reconnection with nature. In this decolonial tableau epilogue, this motif pays off and the Blackbird and the Nightingale, for the time being, are free to fly the skies, singing together.