Many who’ve seen Jennifer Kent’s new revenge epic “The Nightingale” have sensed a traumatic link to her prior outing, “The Babadook” (2014). In both films, a stranded woman is confronted with malice beyond her imagination. Whether inflicted by a black-cloaked demon or the British Empire, the ensuing scars come to redefine her humanity.
But trauma is just the subject matter of “The Nightingale” and “The Babadook.” If there’s a commonality in authorship between the two films it’s that Kent is implicitly and explicitly challenging audiences with her portrayals of pain. As a filmmaker, her gaze is her own. Her unflinching sense of morality while depicting the grossly immoral is jarring. And her scripts deliver protagonists whose sins are not remotely undone by the sins done unto them.
In “The Nightingale,” an Irish penal servant named Clare (Aisling Franciosi) is— among other horrifying indignities—sexually assaulted by a British army officer (Sam Claflin). Yet, in true Kent fashion, that burden changes nothing about the fact that Clare is openly hateful toward the aboriginal man (Baykali Ganambarr) who eventually leads her into the 1825 Tasmanian bush in pursuit of her tormentor. In softening neither the hurt of the rape nor the racism, Kent refuses to play by often-understood movie rules. Some writers have described this as a lack of pity, and that may well be true, though I suspect we’re responding more to the film’s lack of pity for us, the audience, than for the characters for whom Kent’s script seems to have genuine, if knotty, feeling.
To hear Franciosi tell it, this approach to making “The Nightingale” was only possible because of the way Kent carries herself on set. A dialect becomes apparent, a director who’s both a nurturer and a field marshal.
“[Jen is] extremely sensitive. Even the tiniest example of this was having a clinical psychologist on set when we were doing the very difficult sexual violence scenes. I think that’s just so wonderfully sensitive as … a practical safety measure and an emotional one.”
Right alongside that consideration is Kent the fearless auteur, who led her actors deep into both the Australian wilderness and a brutal, primordial moment in the country’s history.
“She also really knows how to push her actors,” Franciosi says. “I don’t think any of us had ever been pushed so hard before.”
In the podcast interview below, Franciosi discusses how she’d (literally) push Kent back, her desire to play more women and fewer girls, and knowing nothing about “Game of Thrones” the day she got the call to play Lyanna Stark. Listen below.