The Nightingale, Jennifer Kent’s bloody follow-up to 2014's The Babadook is a punishing watch. Though he was a fan, our own A.A. Dowd noted its “ceaseless, numbing brutality,” dubbing it “a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory.” Now, you can catch a glimpse of its horrors in a new trailer.
A revenge film set in Tasmania in 1825, the film follows a 21-year old Irish convict played by Aisling Franciosi who links up with an Aboriginal male tracker (Baykali Ganambarr) to exact justice in a world our critic described as a “colonial heart-of-darkness, unyieldingly hostile towards anyone female, nonwhite, and powerless.”
“It’s often as much a horror movie as The Babadook,” we said, “with the lingering phantom of undigested grief and resentment replaced by a deep moral despair, a fear of mankind’s (strong emphasis on the man) capacity for evil.”
Co-stars include Sam Claflin, Ewen Leslie, Harry Greenwood, and Damon Herriman, the man who will play Charles Manson for both Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher. It hits theaters on August 2.