Hawkins sees himself as a man of taste and refinement. He appreciates Clare’s singing, and silences the vulgar catcalls of some of his men when she performs at their mess. He also rapes her, an assault repeated and compounded with acts of savagery that are horrifying but not, in his environment, entirely surprising.

Clare survives the attack and decides, against all reason and advice, to seek payback. Without much hope of finding justice through official channels — a magistrate vaguely promises to file a report of some kind — she takes matters into her own hands, setting out for Launceston with a rifle and a horse. (Hawkins, worried that his promotion is in jeopardy, is on his way there with several of his men.) She also hires an Aboriginal guide named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), since the trackless forests are too dense and dangerous for a white woman to navigate on her own.

Clare’s place in the Tasmanian social hierarchy places her above Billy just as surely as it ranks her below Hawkins and his soldiers, and she treats her new companion with high-handed, racist condescension. For much of their journey, she addresses Billy as “boy,” treating him as a servant or worse even as her survival and sanity depend on him.

She keeps him in the dark about the true purpose of their journey. Not that anyone would take them for a posse in pursuit of an officer and his retinue. The long middle of the film switches back and forth between the unlikely hunters and their unwitting quarry, using their mishaps and chance encounters to cast a hard, sharp light on the racial, sexual and class violence that are central, in Kent’s account, to the founding of modern Australia.

“The Nightingale” is a movie thick with horror and heavy with feeling. Tasmania is in a state of war between what Billy calls “white fella” and “black fella,” a conflict waged without mercy or morality. The whites are engaged in a genocidal campaign that justifies itself as a counter-insurgency. Hawkins is a monster, but hardly an anomaly, and his increasingly sadistic behavior reveals the true face of British authority.