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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 19 JANUARY 2020 12 FILM ALL the trigger warnings. All of them. Despite already hav- ing made a name for herself in the horror genre with her directorial debut feature The Babadook (2014), Australian actress-turned-director Jennif- er Kent now returns to the big screens with a feature that may not explicitly advertise itself as emerging from that generic fold, but whose horrors are arguably all the more affecting for con- taining no whiff of supernatural evil. Perhaps the one element that transfers over from the ear- lier film is Kent's commitment to depicting feminine grief and its close cousin: justified rage. So from a suburban home in present-day Australia where a sin- gle mother's home is stalked by the presence of a top-hatted demon we move to that country a century earlier, specifically Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in 1825, as the 'Black War' rages on, with colonial troops on the warpath to exterminate and 'civilise' the indigenous population. But our entry point into this fraught land- scape is Claire Carroll (Aisling Franciosi), an indentured convict who has married and had a child in captivity. Plying the leering vis- iting troops night in and night out with her beautiful singing voice, she is dubbed a 'nightingale' by the officer presiding over her case, the sadistic Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), who refuses to write a letter that will grant her freedom, even if it is three months overdue. As Claire's indignation bub- bles to the surface, her husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) at- tempts to force the issue with her superiors… to devastating results. Stripped of everything she's ever held dear, Claire embarks on a mission of revenge, picking up the Aboriginal tracker 'Billy' Mangana (Baykali Ganambarr) along the way. That something akin to a part- nership of equals develops be- tween the two on this long (per- haps slightly overlong) journey is one of the only rays of light in an otherwise bleak, though nonethe- less entirely accomplished, second feature from this most promising of international film-makers. There is no way of getting around the stomach-turning cru- elty that characterises the film's opening minutes, and those with sensitive constitutions can con- sider themselves duly warned. Even in a sparsely populated local theatre screening, the gasps and loud groans were audible, a testa- ment both to the film's refusal to gloss over the horrors of colonial Australia, as well as Kent's ability to rise from the dross of the bulk of contemporary cinematic offer- ings to give us something truly jolting. Handled by lesser hands keen to capitalise on the titillation of such scenes, the film would scan as very little other than yet another entry in the always-suspect 'rape re- venge' sub-genre of horror, where cruelty is repaid with equivalent cruelty and we're all allowed to come back home energised by a debased version of cinematic ca- tharsis. Kent, however, lingers on the scenes of rape and murder in a way that doesn't seek to satisfy the yearnings of our reptilian brain, and which always privileges the victim's point of view. Not 'fun' by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly true to its mission to de- pict the power abuses at the cen- tre of the colonial project. Beyond the scenes themselves, the wider story world of the script also displays a similar nuance. In a further undercutting exercise of the exploitative tropes that may have otherwise wormed their way in, the script, also penned by Kent, is careful to show how pret- ty much all of the characters – yes, including the monstrous officers – are subject to power structures that oppress them. The victim sta- tus of Billy and his indigenous col- Brutal to a near fault, Jennifer Kent's follow-up to The Babadook is nonetheless a thrilling and justifiably enraged exploration of one of the darkest chapters of Australia's past Teodor Reljic Systemic horror that chills to the bone