Time Out by Stephen Garrett

Rooted in an especially lawless moment of Australia's past, Jennifer Kent's impressive follow-up to The Babadook finds a new kind of scary.

Little White Lies by Elena Lazic

In Kent’s beautifully balanced and exquisitely shot film, this is the best you can do for someone without negating their experience or agency. The Nightingale similarly does not ask its audience to identify with, root for, or relate to any of its characters. It only tells us to watch and to listen.

TheWrap by Monica Castillo

It’s a movie that viewers might find difficult to love but slow to forget.

The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi

It is as compelling and urgent as it is impossible to stomach.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

This is a profound and difficult film, an attempt to grapple with the existence and mindless perpetuation of evil, and to suggest both the fleeting satisfaction and the eternal futility of vengeance. Nothing about it is easy, and everything it shows us matters.

Variety by Guy Lodge

Kent’s elemental revenge tale attains a near-mythic grandeur over the course of its arduous, ravishing trek. Some stricter editing wouldn’t go amiss, particularly in a needlessly baggy, to-and-fro finale, but it’s a pretty magnificent mass of movie.

Film Threat by Norman Gidney

The Nightingale is another triumph for Kent. Not one to aim for more crowd-pleasing material and palatable choices, she directs this visceral and moving revenge picture with a very sure hand.

Austin Chronicle by Matthew Monagle

There is a confidence and a self-assuredness on display in Kent’s second feature that was only hinted at in her first. From her unflinching examination of the dual standards for gender and ethnicity to the film’s lush compositions, The Nightingale is a tough watch, but one well worth the ugly brush with sexual violence and trauma.

Paste Magazine by Andrew Crump

This is neither a pleasant movie nor a pleasing movie, but it is made with high aesthetic value to offset its unrelenting pitilessness: It’s fastidiously constructed, as one should expect from a director of Kent’s talent, and ferociously acted by her leading trio of Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin.

The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd

There’s something tragically resonant and singular in Kent’s vision of two marginalized characters—one black, the other a woman, both stripped of everything—finding common ground in their parallel trauma and resistance.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

With all this evocative material available it’s unfortunate that Kent lavishes so much of the overgenerous runtime on repetitive and redundant plotting.

IndieWire by Michael Nordine

Acclaimed filmmakers often face the challenge of big expectations on their second features, but Kent joins the ranks of sophomore filmmakers whose new movies expand on their debuts in startlingly ambitious ways.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

There’s a terrific film in here somewhere, with upmarket echoes of the exploitation thriller tradition of the 70s, but it gets lost in overstatement and a surfeit of plot reversals.

Screen International by Jonathan Romney

There’s a terrific film in here somewhere, with upmarket echoes of the exploitation thriller tradition of the 70s, but it gets lost in overstatement and a surfeit of plot reversals.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

If The Nightingale doesn’t quite fulfill the high expectations for Kent’s sophomore feature, it still shows a director with a muscular handle on her craft, though in this case she could have used a script collaborator to address the weaknesses.

The Guardian

Weaving themes of colonialism and class into the broad strokes of a won’t-stop-can’t-stop revenge potboiler, the film marks a step forward for the Australian director in terms of ambition and scope. In execution, however, the songbird hits a few false notes.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

As the film drifts through dream sequences and diversions, the dramatic power of the chase fizzles in the damp of the woods.