Synopsis
The Nightingale (2018) is Jennifer Kent's harrowing revenge drama you can watch online on iFILM. Tasmania, 1825: a young Irish convict tracks the British soldier who tore her family apart across a brutal colonial frontier.
Clare is serving out her sentence at the edge of the empire when Lieutenant Hawkins and his men murder her husband and infant and leave her changed beyond repair. She walks into the Tasmanian bush after him, hiring an Aboriginal tracker named Billy to guide her. Billy carries his own wounds, his country and kin taken by the same men in red coats. An Irishwoman and a Black tracker, strangers who have every reason to distrust each other, slowly find common ground as they push through the wilderness toward the man one wants dead and the other wants to outlive.
Kent made this after her cult horror The Babadook, and it could not be more different, slow and punishing and unwilling to soften what it shows. Aisling Franciosi and first-timer Baykali Ganambarr are extraordinary, and the film took the Special Jury Prize at Venice. It looks the violence of colonization and the genocide of Tasmania's first peoples dead in the eye. Not entertainment, a reckoning. Stream The Nightingale (2018) online on iFILM.
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