Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent is a director, born 1969.
Kent acted before she directed, and the Australian television record here is the ordinary kind: a rural soap, a medical drama, a police procedural, small parts across the 1980s and 1990s. Nothing about that CV predicts what came next.
The Babadook, in 2014, was her first feature and is still the reason most people know the name. Its trick is that the monster stays legible as something else the whole way through. A widowed mother, a difficult child, a house running out of sleep, and a pop-up book that says out loud what the film will not: the horror is domestic exhaustion, and the scares work because the domestic part is observed rather than sketched. Kent also directs the child performance without a shred of cuteness, which is harder than the creature design and much rarer.
Her second film went the other way. The Nightingale premiered at the 75th Venice International Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Lion, and it is a colonial-era revenge story shot with none of the relief a genre audience expects. It is the more serious film and much the harder watch.
Two features in a decade is a deliberate rate. On this evidence she would rather make the difficult one than the next one.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Jennifer Kent
Watch The Babadook as a film about a mother rather than a film about a creature, and start there; the scares land harder that way and the last act makes far more sense. It is also the shorter, tighter and more rewatchable of her two features.
The Nightingale should wait until you are in the right frame of mind. A period revenge story set in colonial Tasmania, it is longer, harsher and much less interested in giving you a way out, and it contains sequences plenty of viewers will not want to sit through twice. Kent knows exactly what she is doing with them, which is the argument, not an accident.
The rest of the pool is her acting years. A Country Practice, G.P. and Murder Call are Australian television of their era, interesting mainly as a footnote on how she learned what a set looks like.