The Nightingale (

2018

) ½

It’s been a while since I reviewed an unofficial, artsy remake of a classic horror/exploitation movie. Believe it or not, I don’t seek this shit out. I’d much watch a good horror movie or a shitty horror movie that is so incompetent that it’s funny, or hell even a shitty horror movie that is just dumb and boring. The problem is, when going into modern “elevated” horror it’s almost impossible to tell the gems (The Witch (2015) and Get Out (2017)) from the junk (Suspiria (2018) and Midsommar (2019)) until you’re knee-deep in its guts, as most reviewers treat all these movies like they are of the highest possible caliber. So, if I want to see some decent modern horror that isn’t mass-market dreck, I’m just gonna have to roll the bones. Today they came up as a boring remake of I Spit on Your Grave (1978) topped with a heaping portion of white guilt and outright bigotry. Oh well, better luck next time.

The Story follows Clare Carroll, an Irish convict in Tasmania in the early 1800s, that has been sent to serve the sadistic Lieutenant Hawkins. This guy is a real piece of shit, who divides his time getting totally shit-faced, knocking the snot out of Clare, and raping her. Presumably, he has a few military responsibilities as well, but if he does we never see him carrying them out. The Lieutenant is such a complete bastard that he won’t even release Clare even though she’s already served her time. Clare’s husband isn’t happy about this, so he asks the lieutenant to let her go, politely at first and when that doesn’t work he opts to challenge the bastard to a fist-fight. In case you haven’t gotten the message about Hawkins yet, he and his cronies Sergeant Ruse and Ensign Jago go and kill Clare’s husband, rape her a couple more times, and smash her baby’s head against the wall. Though, for some reason, they draw the line at killing a woman so they just knock Clare unconscious. It’s a curious sort of chivalry, I’ll give them that.

Hawkins and his accomplices then head off for a trip through the brush to go and beg for a promotion from the senior command in Launceston. Not wanting to wait for Hawkins to get back from his nature hike, Clare goes after him, hiring an aboriginal guide named Billy, and sets off after him. She tells Billy that she’s going to meet her husband, but in fact, she’s planning to kill Hawkins and his flunkies or die trying.

A walk through the Tasmania brush is never an easy trip, but to complicate things for Clare and Hawkins both, the island is currently embroiled in a slow-boiling guerilla war between the European settlers and the local aboriginals. So, the forest is crawling with armed white patrols and black warbands, though the funny thing is, Clare and Billy never seem to run into the latter but constantly seem to come across armed white men who loudly proclaim their interest in Clare’s “Irish cunny.” Indeed, the only aboriginal warriors we see in the film are trying to rescue the wife of their leader after she’s kidnapped and repeatedly raped by Hawkins and his men (in case you’ve somehow forgotten that they’re the bad guys).

As you might have guessed from the above description, and the fact that this is a movie made in the last half-decade, we’re not exactly going to get a nuanced look at the conflict between the settlers and the aboriginals. No, get ready for a two-and-a-half-hour lecture about the evils of white men. Honestly, it felt like I was back in college. Everywhere Billy and Clare go, blacks are being massacred, strung up, clapped in irons, and unceremoniously shot. Considering the total aboriginal death toll for this entire 6-year war was around 900, it seems like about half of them must have died in the week when The Blackbird’s events take place!

Simply depicting all this white violence directed at natives would be sufficient to get the film’s message across, but evidentially the film is a bit worried that audiences might miss the point it’s trying to get across. So instead the film pauses every now and then for a long lecture about the evil of whiteness and white men in particular. Honestly, I’m more insulted by what the film thinks of my intelligence than any of the comments about my sex and race. To be fair, the film does hedge its bets a bit and try to sneak in a “not all white men” at the end by adding in a side character who gives Clare and Billy a bowl of soup, but this is so transparently a shield against accusations of racism I scarcely need to mention it.

Clare gets a pass on her whiteness since she’s Irish, and the film tries to argue that this doesn’t count. It’s an odd point to make as she is no less a colonist than any other white person in Australia. The bulk of them are convicts that have been sent down under to be confined and eventually released. It reminds me of the absurdly ahistorical “Irish and black only” bathrooms from Bioshock Infinite [2013]. I’ll confess, I don’t understand why modern-day progressives are so hell-bent on pretending that blacks and Irish were treated the same way in the 19th century when it’s an apples and oranges comparison. Maybe they’re just searching for a way to exempt themselves from their own ludicrous assertion that all white people bear responsibility for the crimes of the colonial period. In which case they are agonizingly close to realizing how blisteringly stupid concepts of racial guilt are; too bad they can’t reach the obvious conclusion.

Of course, the principal face of the white colonizer is Lieutenant Hawkins himself and boy is he ever a piece of shit. Indeed, his evil quickly goes from irredeemable bastard to cartoonish monster, to the point where I was left wondering what heinous action he’d commit next. Is he going to rape a child, kill and eat his native guide, shoot his second in command for a laugh? All are perfectly consistent with how his character has been defined. Yet, as we quickly realize the definition of Hawkins's character is just a “guy who commits evil acts.” Your average Conan villain is more believable than this guy.

The film does briefly flirt with giving some kind of humanity to Hawkins when it introduces a young (I’d guess around 8-year-old) convict boy. Hawkins is, for whatever reason taken with the boy and eventually goes so far as to arm him and give him some basic instruction on survival and life in general. It’s a relationship that makes a good deal of sense, as Hawkins with his stunted sense of ethics is not altogether different from an overgrown child. Moreover, it’s reasonable that his brutish masculinity would appeal to the young boy, especially one in desperate need of a male role model.

However, The Nightingale quickly pisses all that away in the scene where Hawkins orders the boy to shoot Billy, and the boy misses. In a better film, Hawkins would console the crying boy, and confidentially reassure him: “You’ll hit the next one” a move that would show both his faith in the boy, his understanding that he’s still just a child, and underlie just how fucked up Hawkins, and by extension the entire colonizer worldview, is. Unfortunately, this is not a good film, and Hawkins promptly shoots the boy so we can add child murder to his list of crimes because we have to be really sure that the audience understands he’s evil. The film is terrified that if it turns Lieutenant Hawkins into a real human being it will undercut its crass political message. So, it forces the character to act in an absurdly fiendish way, even when it contradicts his established character. It’s a clear case of a filmmaker being so insecure about their film’s message, that they undercut the artistic integrity of the work.

I can accept a film that loudly proclaims that all Anglo-Saxon men are Satan-incarnate. Hell, a good chunk of Hong Kong action movies could be described by that phrase and I’m not about to pretend that The Legend of the Drunken Master (1994) or Once Upon a Time in China (1991) are bad films just because every gweilo in them is a rotten bastard. The real problem with The Nightingale is that it’s just so fucking boring. Indeed, it’s almost impressive how a rape-revenge film can be this ploddingly, intolerably dull. It’s a story of vicious crime and just retribution, so why am I fighting to stay awake half the time?

Part of the problem is that despite the occasional graphic rape or blood-soaked murder, the vast majority of the film consists of characters walking aimlessly through the woods. As a result, it feels like one of those cheapo independent/amateur films like Robot Monster (1953) where the filmmakers don’t have access to any locations so they opt to shoot the entire film in their local nature preserve. The film’s politics don’t help it in the pacing department either, as periodically the action will have to grind to a halt so we can have another quick lecture about the evils of colonialism in general and British men in particular. Yet, even if all this were stripped out I still think that The Nightingale would be an intolerably sluggish movie. There are just so many superfluous lingering shots of the characters walking and staring. Indeed, I suspect there is a mediocre 75-minute movie lurking somewhere inside this two-and-half-hour abomination if only a proper editor could be found to cut it down to size.

The characters only make matter worse, these have to be the laziest most passive characters I’ve ever seen in an action movie. Seriously, I lost count of the number of times Clare and Hawkins came face-to-face and then inexplicably backed off, so they could go back to wandering around the forest. Clare talks a mean game about killing Hawkins but she doesn’t have any follow-through. Worse, it’s not because she lacks the will to kill, she has no trouble disemboweling Ensign Jago early on in the film. Nor is she toying with Hawkins, trying to make him feel fear and helplessness before his end. Her actions, in short, make no fucking sense and serve only to prolong a movie that is already way too long. It’s almost amusing when Billy, presumably as fed up with Clare’s inactions as the audience, goes and finally kills Hawkins and Ruse for Clare. What an odd message for a film with an ostensibly feminist message: Girls, don't take an active hand in your life, just wait around for a man to do everything for you. That's enough to give pause to even the most dyed-in-the-wool woman haters out there. 

At least Clare is a meek civilian unaccustomed to the bloody work of killing and war, the same cannot be said for Hawkins who doesn’t balk at ordering a baby’s head bashed in or shooting an unarmed child for no reason. This guy would kill his own men if they inconvenienced him in the slightest. Yet, when Clare shows up he suddenly becomes Gandhi and refuses to resort to violence. Hawkins comes face to face with Clare several times throughout the interminable nature hike that makes up the bulk of the film’s runtime only to let her go, time after time. Even the supporting characters seem to be afflicted by this strange passivity, at one-point Hawkins is cornered by a group of armed native men who want their leader’s wife back, Hawkins shoots the wife and runs off. The leader, overcome by grief cradles her dying body, which is understandable, but what the hell are his men doing just standing around watching Hawkins leg it into the woods?

Also, and this is the definition of a subjective complaint, but there’s way too much acapella singing. Maybe that shit can sound halfway decent in a barbershop quartet, but with lone singers, it always sounds feeble. Give me a break and cut in some extra-diegetic music, please. Or better yet don’t have your characters sing so much.