Jennifer Kent's TheNightingale discovers a new kind of satisfaction for revenge cinema
a revenge film sets an expectation of triumph, found in the satisfaction of grim justice done on the unjust. Let it be known that there’s no such catharsis in Jennifer Kent’s followup to her 2014 debut. Revenge, while indeed a dish best served cold, tends to be prepared in one of two ways in cinema: with fist-pumping vigor or soul-corroding sobriety.
is an honest film, Clare, low as she is on the social totem pole, treats Billy like garbage. She may be sub-human, but she’s more human, or at least less sub-human, than him.doesn’t soft-shoe the trickle-down function of white supremacy, but it does single out whiteness exactly as the social construct that authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates know it to be. Frankly, the film owes a perhaps unintended debt to Coates’, an epistolary novel in which he muses that even the Irish were once considered “black.
“This is my country,” Billy laments between sobs in a key scene toward the film’s ending. “This is my home.” In a rare moment of humanity, he and Clare are sheltered by a kindly farmer , who offers them a place to rest their heads and food to fill their bellies. The white folks sit at the table. Billy reflexively sits on the floor. The farmer invites him to join them. Billy’s incredulous at first, wary of being hit by the whip that’s lashed his back most of his life.
Kent is too shrewd a filmmaker to argue that Clare’s suffering trumps Billy’s, or to make any equivalency between them. She understands what must happen to fulfill Clare’s part in the story, and what must happen to fulfill Billy’s part. That she’s able to so seamlessly achieve both is an incredible accomplishment.on obvious grounds of genre and style, though there are horrors here aplenty: Nightmare beats where Clare dances with Aidan, then with Hawkins and her other attackers.