a whisper in the dark

You think you understand violence. You think you’ve seen it, measured it, weighed it in your hands like something you could master, something that bends to the will of the wielder. You think a weapon is just a tool. But you’ve never drawn a bow. Not properly. Not in the way that matters.

A blade is a scream. A gunshot is a sentence with no pause, just full stop. But the bow—the bow is a whisper in the dark, a decision made in the space between breath and action, a thing that is neither here nor there, neither past nor present, neither yours nor anyone’s. It does not belong to the moment. It belongs to what comes after. Once the arrow is loosed, it is gone, irretrievable, unchangeable. It does not argue. It does not linger in hesitation. It has no remorse. It does not love you back.

And that is why it is the truest weapon of fate.

Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth (2015) and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) understand this, though they wear their knowledge in different skins. One, a fevered nightmare of prophecy and ambition, where Scotland rots under the weight of its own ghosts. The other, a brutal lament for the kind of justice that never truly arrives, set against the blackened soul of colonial Tasmania. Both are riddled with silence and suffering, both crush their characters beneath forces too great to fight, and both, in the end, are haunted by the bow—the thing that reaches further than man’s grasp, the thing that speaks in the cold tongue of inevitability.

You see it in Macbeth, when the Thane of Cawdor meets his end. No grand monologue, no moment of redemption. Just arrows. One after the other, puncturing the man’s body like punctuation marks at the end of a long and pointless sentence. He stands, he takes it, he absorbs his fate with the dull inevitability of mud drinking rain. That is the kind of death that only arrows can deliver—something from a distance, something impersonal, something that strips the ego from dying and leaves only the fact of it. Swords demand intimacy. Guns demand efficiency. But the bow demands faith. And faith, in Macbeth, is a thing wasted.

But The Nightingale does not waste it. Kent’s film is not a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense—it is something uglier, something rawer, something that does not dress itself in poetry but spits its truth into the dirt and waits for you to choke on it. Clare, the Irish convict, and Billy, the Aboriginal tracker, are both shackled to a world that does not want them. But Billy has the bow. And that means something.

The bow is older than empire. Older than the musket, older than the uniforms and the laws they scrawl onto stolen land. The bow is not just a weapon, not just a tool. It is memory. It is history in flight. When Billy looses his arrows, he is not simply killing—he is reaching back, reclaiming something, speaking in the only language the land remembers. And the land listens.

That is the thing about arrows. They do not simply kill. They do not simply maim. They remind.

Robin Hood’s arrows carve rebellion into the air. Odysseus bends his bow, proving himself the master of a world that had forgotten him. The Mongols reshape history with their horse-drawn archery, rewriting maps with every shaft that finds its mark. But in Macbeth and The Nightingale, the bow is not a symbol of triumph. It is not a weapon of heroes. It is something colder, something closer to the truth.

Fate does not love you. It does not hate you. It simply waits, and when the time comes, it moves.

That is what it means to hold a bow. To draw the string, to feel the tension in your fingertips, to know that in one breath, you hold the weight of everything and nothing at all. The moment before release is the purest moment in existence. Because in that second, the world is still yours. The decision has not yet been made. The arrow has not yet flown. You are neither executioner nor savior, neither hero nor coward. You are simply the thing that holds the string.

But the moment passes. The fingers release.

And then, it is gone.

And what follows, you can never take back.