![]() Things get much worse when Aidan attempts to reason with the Lieutenant, leading Clare on a mission to seek revenge against Hawkins, who has fled North to gain a promotion. Forced to drudge work and occasionally trotted out in front of the troops to regale them with her beautiful singing voice, Clare begs for her freedom and suffers violently for it. An Irish family, Clare (Aisling Franciosi), her sweet husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) and their baby, live in service to Lieutenant Hawkins (a scarily convincing Sam Claflin), a sadistic, abusive man who refuses to keep his promise and set the family free. Set in Tasmania, then called Van Diemen's Land, in 1825, the film drops us into the English colonization period where European prisoners were sent over into a life of indentured servitude. She spares no details and never looks away in this excessively and rightfully violent revenge saga driven by female rage. Jennifer Kent, who made a splash with her debut thriller, The Babadook, understands how to present feminism on film with her brutal, unblinking, unforgiving, follow-up, The Nightingale. She's right! My world has been turned upside down! Chores don't come with genitals! I consider myself so lucky to not have to struggle with this issue and to be able to see the world through this lens. One day, one of my sisters turned to my father and said, "Dad, I wasn't born with a dishwashing gene." A light bulb went off in my seven-year-old head. ![]() Boys would take out the garbage and mow the lawn while the girls would set the table and do the dishes. As the youngest of eight children whose parents divvied up family chores according to strict gender lines, I saw right through the ridiculous role-playing exercises our society demanded of us. My mother, resenting the limitations of the housewife role, enrolled in college, and woke up to the manipulative and damaging effects of the patriarchy. CRIME AND PUNISHING - My Review of THE NIGHTINGALE (4 Stars)
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