Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Nightingale
2018 · Jennifer Kent · The Nightingale on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how the trees close in on the narrow frame. (camera)
Ladczuk shoots in the near-square Academy ratio and keeps the camera close and shoulder-borne on faces. The Tasmanian bush never opens out. It presses against the edges of nearly every shot.
Payoff: A Western usually opens the land up as a promise, and this one uses it to keep people penned in.
Watch where the light is coming from indoors. (light)
Interiors run on candle and firelight. Exteriors are gray, wet, and low. Ladczuk grades everything toward desaturation, so there is no burnished period glow anywhere in the picture.
Payoff: The look refuses to make 1825 handsome, which keeps you registering conditions instead of admiring costumes.
Listen for who asks Clare to sing. (sound)
Franciosi's Clare sings in Irish when the soldiers tell her to. Billy sings in his own language for himself. Jed Kurzel's score stays low and rare, leaving rain, wind, birds, and breath.
Payoff: Song is either pulled out of a person or claimed by one, and the film keeps sorting which is happening.
Watch how Claflin plays Hawkins when he wants something. (performance)
Claflin drops his romantic-lead manner and gives Hawkins ordinary ambition and wounded pride. He wants a promotion. The cruelty comes out through routine requests and the way he stands in other people's rooms.
Payoff: The violence sits inside plain career appetite, which is harder to watch than any gothic villain would be.
Notice how soldiers take up the space around Clare. (staging)
Kent stages rank with bodies. Men fill her doorway, her room, her chair. Billy gets positioned as a useful tool and as a target in the same shot. Nobody announces the hierarchy.
Payoff: You can read who owns whom off the blocking, which keeps the politics physical instead of spoken.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the edges of the frame. The bush never opens out, and neither does the world these two are held in.