Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
In 1825, Clare, a 21-year-old Irish convict, chases a British soldier through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. She enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.
Jennifer Kent's brutal and unflinching revenge film is distinguished by exceptional performances—particularly Aisling Franciosi and Baykali Ganambarr—and stunning, claustrophobic widescreen Tasmanian cinematography shot in a tall 1.33:1 aspect ratio that enhances the suffocating wilderness. The film's novelty is genuine: it subverts the rape-revenge genre by centering colonial trauma, Indigenous dispossession, and intersecting oppressions with remarkable authenticity and moral complexity, making it a singular work in Australian cinema. The plot, while effectively constructed, can feel somewhat repetitive in its episodic brutality, and the ending, though thematically earned, lands with a quiet devastation that some may find emotionally incomplete rather than cathartic.