The Nightingale

Irish prisoner Irin Clare ( Aisling Franciosi ) has been working for the British army fighting against the indigenous people in Australia in 1825 for a while. All the while she accepted the abuse, the violence, even the rape. But when Lieutenant Hawkins ( Sam Claflin ) murders her husband and child, leaving her traumatized, she vows to exact revenge on him and his men. And so she takes everything she has left and convinces the tracker Billy ( Baykali Ganambarr ) to lead her to the troupe – whatever the cost…

When 2014’s Sundance’s The Babadook took festivals and critics by storm, that may have been partly because of the person behind it. Female directors still have a rather difficult time in the film business. When someone in her mid-40s makes her feature film debut in the horror field, which is now really a purely male domain, then that’s always good for a headline – no matter how bitter it may sound. But it wouldn’t be fair to reduce the work solely to the fact that, untypically, a woman was in charge here. The mixture of classic horror with family drama and the theme of dealing with grief was so unusual that The Nightingale has since been used as a reference for psychologically motivated horror.

With “The Nightingale ” Jennifer Kent demonstrates once again that she is one of the most interesting voices in genre cinema when she combines conventional revenge thrillers with a reappraisal of the almost unbearably brutal colonialism horror. While the buddy movie elements are fairly conventional, overall she has pulled off an impressive and depressing contribution.

• The Nightingale