Watch the Trailer for ‘The Babadook’ Director’s Horrifying New Movie, ‘The Nightingale’
After making 2014’s The Babadook, a masterfully wrought, traumatizing horror flick whose titular villain somehow became a queer icon, director Jennifer Kent is finally back with a follow-up—and from the looks of the trailer, this thing is going to be even more disturbing than her debut.
On Wednesday, IFC gave us our first real look at The Nightingale, a gory, brutal revenge film set in 1800s Tasmania, then home to a slew of English penal colonies. The movie follows Clare (Aisling Franciosi), a convict ruled over by a ruthless British officer (Sam Claflin) who makes her life a living hell. After he rapes her repeatedly, murders her husband and her baby, and leaves her to die, Clare vows to track him down and kill him—setting out on a sprawling, against-all-odds quest with the help of an aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr).
So, yes: seriously, seriously dark stuff. But judging from a few early reviews, all that violence and brutality serves a purpose—and the result, if you can bear it, is pretty staggering. Variety called it a movie of “shattering brutality and hard-earned grace”; Slashfilm lauded it as “cruel but essential viewing,” and the Guardian praised it as a “fascinating pitch that brings a new perspective to a well-worn genre.”
If you think you’ve got the stomach for it, you can catch The Nightingale in theaters when it debuts on August 2.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.
420GrowLife
via Trippy.Tube
