By Jennifer Kent's directorial follow-up to 2014's The Babadook, in which a steampunk goth harassed a grieving mum and her child, is reportedly so uncompromisingly brutal that some audiences have taken to walking out and shouting at the screen during early showings.
The Nightingale's unflinching depiction of its protagonist, Clare, being repeatedly raped in the first half-hour led to walk-outs and shouted protests during a screening at the Sydney Film Festival, according to News.com.au. The revenge thriller is set in Tasmania, off the coast of Australia, in 1825 and follows Clare as she travels through the bush seeking retribution for the atrocities committed by British troops against her family.
Kent said in a statement released yesterday that despite the distressing scenes - which she acknowledged in a Q&A viewers had "every right" to walk out of - The Nightingale is fundamentally about "the need for love, compassion and kindness in dark times". She added that she'd been contacted by survivors of sexual violence who were grateful to her for making the film, and doubted that that would have happened "if the film was at all gratuitous or exploitative".
The statement continued: "Whilst The Nightingale contains historically accurate depictions of colonial violence and racism towards our Indigenous people, the film is not ‘about’ violence … We’ve made this film in collaboration with Tasmanian Aboriginal elders, and they feel it’s an honest and necessary depiction of their history and a story that needs to be told. I remain enormously proud of the film."
In fact, Kent went on to say, the level of violence and grimness shown in the film was actually a slightly sanitised take on what life was like under British colonial rule. "If we showed what really happened in Tasmania in 1825, no audience could bear it," she said.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
