Cirrus@Austlit

'Writer-director Jennifer Kent’s terrific first feature, The Babadook (2014), was a very superior horror movie set in Adelaide; her second, The Nightingale, which won two major prizes last year in Venice, is also a horror movie but, unlike its predecessor, the horror this time isn’t supernatural but all too real. Kent’s uncompromising approach to this story of colonial violence against women and Aborigines in Van Dieman’s Land in the early 19th century is pretty confronting at times. I’m sure she would argue that it had to be because, to tell this story — and it’s a story that demands to be told — there’s no hiding the fact that some terrible crimes were committed by the English colonisers.'(Introduction)