The Nightingale is not an easy watch or a pleasant one. The Nightingale is punctuated by intense and probing close-ups of characters’ faces, as if scrutinising them and inviting the audience to stare at these people head-on most notably characters like Clare and Billy, but also Lieutenant Hawkins and his pathetic band of violent and entitled murderers. To Kent, those faces are just as important as the landscape they inhabit. The other interesting aspect of Kent’s choice of aspect ratio is the way in which the frame is almost perfectly proportioned to accommodate faces. Some of the night-time shots have a particularly ethereal quality to them, which often feel expressionistic spectres emerging from the shadows into the light of a campfire, a horse riding up a hill towards a house framed by a dead and mangled tree, even a horse following a well-worn path by moonlight. Kent and Ladczuk repeatedly blur the boundaries between the country’s physical geography and the dreamscape inhabited by the characters. As brutal and violent as the frontier might be, there is also something strangely alluring about it. Radek Ladczuk’s cinematography is striking. The Nightingale is a film of stark beauty. “I’ve spent years civilising this land,” Hawkins boasts at one point, and it is clear that his definition of “civilising” means imposing familiar social structures to place men like him at the top. Billy is also aware of that stark reality. Even before the horrific inciting incident that sparks Clare’s vendetta against Lieutenant Hawkins, The Nightingale makes it clear that Clare exists under his thumb and at his whims. They constantly remind the audience of the social hierarchies and systems at play, even in a region as seemingly lawless as the Australian wilderness. These vertical compositions serve an important thematic purpose as well.

Instead of wide open spaces, The Nightingale sketches a portrait of a frontier that always threatening to overwhelm the characters. Characters are frequently climbing up hills, or framed in the shadow of mountains.

As a result, Kent builds her compositions vertically rather than horizontally. The Nightingale is a beautiful film, featuring a number of striking establishing shots and some wonderful scenery, but the aspect ratio creates a situation where the screen is almost as tall as it is wide. This creative choice also informs how Kent portrays Australia itself, eschewing the sorts of panaromas that one expects from a western. Instead, The Nightingale presents the frontier as incredibly dense and overwhelming branches cluttering up paths, leaves in travelers’ faces, forests that are so deep they might swallow a person whole. The Nightingale is not interested in the frontier as a vast and limitless horizon, a huge stretch of land so vast and ripe with potential that it would struggle to be contained within Cinerama or VistaVision. Most obviously and immediately, it affects how Kent portrays the wilderness into which Clare and Billy are wandering. Kent shoots The Nightingale in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is an interesting choice on a number of levels. As Clare journeys deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, she discovers that the suffering inflicted upon her and her family is just one expression of a more primal and insidious violence, and that perhaps she has more in common with Billy than she might originally think. However, perhaps the most striking aspect of The Nightingale is how – for all its unflinching brutality and refusal to offer trite sentimentality – the film advances an argument for intersectionalism. The Nightingale is a bleak and cynical piece of film, one that is occasionally suffocating and dizzying in its portrayal of man’s capacity for inhumanity. Kent’s direction is tense and claustrophobic, refusing to ever let the audience look away from the horrors inflicted upon the continent by the European settlers who presumed to claim it as their own. The Nightingale belongs to a rich tradition of Australian westerns including modern classics like The Proposal, stories that play on the frontier myth and explore the country’s deeply troubled and unsettled history.

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