WOLFRAM

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

We’ve been conditioned to expect the unexpected. So perhaps it’s not all that surprising that Wolfram is a “follow-up”, to Sweet Country. That earlier film, a blistering neo-western about an Indigenous farmhand who shoots a white man in self-defense and is doggedly pursued by a police sergeant, ended with terrible finality – a closing act of violence tearing through whatever faint illusion remained that justice might have been possible for Indigenous people in the colonial frontier.
Wolfram unfolds four years later, in 1932, and it carries the unmistakable fingerprints of its director. As always with Thornton, the atmosphere impresses, oozing a bruised kind of melancholy. Several figures return from Sweet Country including the brooding station owner Mick Kennedy, and his now 18-year-old Aboriginal son, Philomac. But Wolfram is a self-contained narrative, opening amid the wolfram (tungsten) mines, where Aboriginal siblings Max and Kid are forced to work under the watch of Billy, whose sudden death upends their lives.
Joined by Philomac, they flee across an unforgiving landscape, pursued by Kennedy and a pair of outlaws: Casey and Frank. There’s also Pansy, an Arrernte mother of stolen children, heading out of town with her partner, Chinese wolfram miner Zhang, and her newborn baby, hoping to start anew in Queensland.
Performances, however, are strong across the board. Wright brings an ugly, sweltering presence, with a feral glint in his eyes, and Jackson exudes a rare kind of magnetism. Thornton, a rare director who is also his own cinematographer, knows how to conjure the thick, arid stink of a meat pie western. He delivers a film of rough-hewn, harsh beauty, as if it’s been dropped in the dust and stomped on. This is a work from a major talent.