They ultimately kill him, but that neither resolves their pain nor is the ultimate solution the film puts forth. The story has become a question of what to do when caught in a world that refuses to acknowledging another person’s humanity, or, as Billy and Clare put it when contemplating what to do about Hawkins, when they just won’t listen. But The Nightingale has become about much more than her journey at this point. If this was simply about her revenge then the movie would end with their confrontation, which involves no further violence. When Hawkins rapes Clare, she recruits an aboriginal guide named Billy ( Baykali Ganambarr) to chase after Hawkins to kill him, but by the time they catch up with him the bloodlust is gone. The Nightingale is roughly structured as a rape/revenge movie, but like all the familiar pieces it builds itself on, it subtly subverts this. In refusing to listen to others he becomes capable of doing anything to them, and because of this he is doomed to spread horror and, ultimately, to die. It’s not just that he has an end goal and plows through anyone in his way he’s literally annoyed by the space other people take up in his life, including, even, the time it takes to listen and respond to another person’s pain. This crescendo of pain and silence recurs throughout the movie, and it’s in this late repetition that it is revealed as a motivation for Hawkins’ actions. The gun fired, the boy fell, and the movie went quiet before he uttered the line. This was highlighted in what was for me the most chilling line of the movie: “I can’t stand the fucking noise of it.” This is growled by Hawkins after shooting a boy he saw potential in, one who let him down and began crying, pleading for a second chance. He is the source of much of the film’s brutality, and while it would be easy to cast him as representative of British colonialism as a whole, there’s something much more personal and much more upsetting behind his actions. Her rapes her and many other women, he’s responsible for the death of her husband and baby, and he metes out punishment to his men not for their betterment but to meet his own ends. An ambitious officer ruling over a little slice of Tasmania, he refuses to grant Irish convict Clare ( Aislling Franciosi) her freedom long after she’s served her time. Lieutenant Hawkins ( Sam Claflin), at first glance, may seem like evil incarnate. ![]() You listen or you don’t, and as she highlights again and again by making the audience hear everything these characters go through, only one carries the chance of making the world bearable. There is no in between, there is no compromise. This extra attention to sound isn’t simply well-played emotional manipulation, though it’s the heart of the dilemma she puts in front of her characters: in an unforgiving, maddening world, do you remain open, do you continue feeling the pain of those around you, or do close yourself off. Talk about playing an audience like a fiddle. Watch that scene (you know the one) again and note how the baby’s cries, a noise we’re hardwired to find excruciating, rises and falls. Instead she leans heavily on some immaculate sound mixing and editing, allowing that to communicate pain and depravity over the visuals. Her characters are put through the wringer, and despite what people may say, it’s far from the most graphic take on this story we could’ve gotten. Kent hinted at her storytelling mastery in her debut, The Babadook, but she unleashed it in The Nightingale, using her clout to tell her country’s unreckoned with history and the danger that comes from ignoring it. ![]() But none got the knee-jerk revulsion that The Nightingale experienced, and that’s because what really upset people is not what Kent was talking about but the way she articulated it: through sound, the sound of rage, the sound of human beings breaking, the sound of indifference. The Lost City of Z shed light on its egotistical downfall, Embrace of the Serpent cast the erasure of indiginous cultures as a waking nightmare, and Zama put the Spanish in their place with an unimpressed llama. ![]() And yet this isn’t a complete justification, especially as movies across the world are taking the piss out of colonialism in ways both serious and comical. The subject matter excuses it, some argued, rightly pointing out that the rapes, murders, and other inhumane acts were all accurate to the period of colonial Tasmania that the film is set in.
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