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Jennifer Kent’s Australian film “The Nightingale,” from 2018, is an astonishing, unflinching examination of man’s inhumanity to man, told through the lens of a female Irish convict in Tasmania under British occupation in the 19th century.
I’m not a big fan of trigger warnings, but if ever there was a film that needed one, this is it. It’s art, there’s no question about that, but it has what is possibly the most excruciatingly painful scene of violence I’ve ever seen on film.
You’ve been forewarned.
There has been a movement in the last few years in film, television, and fiction to bring stories of oppressed minorities to the mainstream, and we are beginning to see the fruits of that. I am fascinated and eager to learn from these experiences, but boy is it sobering to see what humans are capable of. It’s one thing to intellectually understand the horrors of war, racism, and oppression, but it’s another thing entirely to see it captured unflinchingly on film or in fiction. Our species is capable of depraved violence on a level that is very difficult to face.
The thing is, we have to face this stuff to move beyond it (and hopefully learn how to mitigate this monstrous aspect of our nature), so these works are important, particularly when done to this level of artistic achievement.
But holy fuck—my wife experienced a visceral reaction the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen. She walked out of the room in a rage—and I understood why.
But we have to come to terms with this stuff, and art is how we do it.
You and I may have never behaved with indifferent cruelty, but make no mistake— this is part of our collective humanity, whether we want to believe it or not.
We have to face who we are in order to change and move on.