A haunting indigenous western that follows two fugitive siblings, a conflicted older ally and a distant mother as they navigate exploitation, mining and survival in central Australia
Warwick Thornton returns to the harsh frontier with Wolfram, a meditative drama that revisits the arid spaces he explored in Sweet Country. Set around the imagined settlement of Henry, the film follows two Aboriginal children, their absent mother, and a mixed‑heritage ally as they navigate the brutal mechanics of dispossession and control in a colonial era. Rather than racing from plot point to plot point, Wolfram asks you to slow down and feel the place it depicts.
Thornton favors atmosphere over plot. His camera lingers on wide, sun-bleached vistas, then tightens to tactile close‑ups—hands weathered by work, dust caught in the crease of a palm, the minute life that persists in a hostile landscape. Sound is used with equal deliberation: sparse percussion and the hush of wind or footsteps build tension, while silence gives room for small gestures to land. The landscape is not backdrop but character; the environment exerts moral pressure on every decision.
At the story’s heart are Max and Kid, two children whose forced removal and coerced labour make the film’s stakes painfully immediate. Their viewpoint compresses complex systems—law, property, extraction—into sensory detail: a hand pushed away, the scrape of a cart wheel, the sun at midday. The child’s-eye perspective sharpens emotional clarity but also narrows the frame, which is both the film’s virtue and its limitation. By filtering much through youthful perception, Thornton preserves privacy and dignity, yet some viewers may wish for broader context or more connective narrative threads.
Philomac, a pragmatic young man of mixed heritage, occupies the film’s moral center in a different register. His choices are pragmatic rather than heroic—small acts of negotiation, occasional compromises—and they underscore how survival often looks like moral ambiguity. Pansy, played by Deborah Mailman, supplies the film’s quieter emotional current. Mailman’s restrained, interior performance anchors scenes that might otherwise drift into abstraction; her small domestic rituals—cutting a lock of hair, leaving a token—accumulate into a ledger of care and loss.
Antagonists in Wolfram are drawn as part of a system rather than as one‑dimensional caricatures. A pair of white outlaws and a station owner enact procedural brutality, their cruelty embedded in routine. Thornton and his co‑writers—Steven McGregor and David Tranter—show how institutions and social habits reproduce violence. Not every white character is uniformly villainous; Thornton allows for hesitation and contradiction, which complicates a simple oppressor–victim framing. Short scenes featuring Chinese miners add another thread of cross-cultural contact and imperfect solidarity, reminding us that resistance takes many forms and is rarely neat.
Visually, the film is meticulous. Thornton doubles as director and cinematographer, and that dual role gives Wolfram a unified sensory logic. The palette favors ochres and washed tans; close‑ups of insects, cracked earth and callused hands turn small details into metaphors for fragility and persistence. The editing is spare—long takes replace montage, and the camera’s calm gaze forces the viewer to linger. The sound design complements this restraint, using diegetic noise and quiet score passages to keep the film grounded in the world it depicts.
The screenplay carries cultural weight: Tranter’s family history and mixed heritage inform the narrative’s stakes, rooting the story in lived experience rather than abstract theory. That grounding makes the film feel like both testimony and investigation—an attempt to trace how resource extraction (the title references wolfram/tungsten) reshapes families and communities across generations. Scenes about mining and coerced labour are not merely historical detail; they are structural explanation, showing how commodities and law displace bonds and reshape futures.
But restraint brings trade‑offs. The film’s mood-first approach sometimes shortchanges narrative momentum. Several plot developments land with convenience, and some relationships—particularly alliances between Indigenous characters—could have been more fully explored. These gaps leave moments that feel underconnected, as if parts of the story were implied rather than fully lived on screen. For viewers who want a propulsive plot, Wolfram may test patience; those open to mood pieces will find its rhythms rewarding.
Performances are a major strength. Mailman’s Pansy steadies the film’s mournful energy; the younger cast brings a raw, improvisational vitality that resists sentimentality. Together they make the film’s quieter moments resonate. Critics will likely foreground these performances and the film’s ethical choices about representation—who is shown suffering, who tells the story, and how that gaze is mediated.
Wolfram sits within a growing southern‑hemisphere cinema that centers Indigenous perspectives on colonial histories. It is austere and tender in equal measure: careful camerawork, intentional pacing and a lived-in sense of place make it a distinctive, if occasionally uneven, work. For viewers interested in historical reckonings presented through sensory detail and a child-led viewpoint, Wolfram offers a powerful encounter with memory, labour and resilience—one that lingers more in the limbs and the hush between lines than in tidy plot resolutions.