Oscar-winning director Guillermo Del Toro backs controversial Aussie horror film The Nightingale

Oscar-winning director Guillermo Del Toro has come out in defence of Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent, whose grisly new movie The Nightingale sparked audiences to walk out in disgust.

Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent has a high-profile champion in the form of Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro.

Kent’s 2014 debut horror feature The Babadook, starring Essie Davis, was a sleeper hit around the world earning rave reviews and some high-profile fans.

But her follow-up, The Nightingale, now showing at the Melbourne International Film Festival ahead of a wider release on August 29, has proved more controversial.

The grisly tale set in convict-era Tasmania caused outrage when it screened at the Sydney Festival in June, prompting some audience members to walk out in disgust at the brutal rape scenes and graphic murders.

Jennifer Kent on set of The Nightingale.

Kent defended the film, which was shot in tough conditions on location in Tasmania, saying “whilst The Nightingale contains historically accurate depictions of colonial violence and racism towards our Indigenous people, the film is not ‘about’ violence”.

Horror master del Toro, whose films include Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and Pacific Rim and who won the 2018 Best Picture and Best Director Oscar for The Shape Of Water, said he admired Kent for sticking to her guns.

“I am a believer in her as a storyteller — that’s the most important thing,” said del Toro. “The profound function that storytelling has for Australian culture and Mexican culture is very different — but also very different from the rest of the world.

“And I think Jennifer has the stature and the tools and the will to tell the stories that she thinks are important and in the way she thinks they should be told, regardless of the advice of anyone around her.

“In the last two or three years I have been privy to her tribulations in putting together her films and going at them with a limited budget and in incredibly adverse conditions, so I am a big, big admirer of what she did.”

Lana Del Rey, Guillermo del Toro and J.J. Abrahms appear at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony honouring Guillermo del Toro. Picture: Getty

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Mexican-born del Toro, who produced new film Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark, which releases here next month, yesterday earned a spot alongside some of his horror heroes on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

“I walked the Walk Of Fame when I was a kid and it meant so much to see Boris Karloff’s star or Lon Cheney’s star or Alfred Hitchcock’s,” he said. So to be there is very moving.”

Alongside fellow filmmaker J.J. Abrams and singer Lana Del Rey, who provides a song for the new movie, del Toro used the occasion to urge fellow immigrants to reject fear and division in the US.

Speaking in the aftermath of the El Paso mass shootings, he told the crowd that “great fear” was being used to divide people, but “those divisions are complete fantasies.”

“When people say, ‘You dwell in fantasy,’ I say, ‘I don’t. Politicians do, churches do, I don’t. I deal with facts of the soul and the stories.’”

He added: “Do not believe the lies they tell about us. Believe in the stories you have inside and believe that we all can make a difference.”