Vassilis Kroustallis reviews the Australian Western 'Wolfram' by Warwick Thornton.
There are many tribes and tribulations in 'Wolfram', an Australian Western and a sequel of sorts to Warwick Thornton's 2017 film 'Sweet Country'. The director of 'Wolfram', now in competition at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival, doesn't leave much space to fantasy; he starts with the single thing and shot that gives the film its name (the Hatches Creek Wolfram field in Northern Australia), in which a small child digs for tungsten out of the ground. And the film moves into a fascinating, expected, and, at the same time, painful journey through the reunion stories of its many characters.
Divided into four parts (the film is set in 1932), and photographed by Thornton himself in colors and shots that evoke the classical West of the movies, yet the film somehow has its own uneasy look. The flies are the signature prop and visual in all of the characters' lives (good and bad), as if telling us (but rather too showy and empty of content) that both sides of the coin, the white Australians and the Indigenous Australians, need to survive in the same inhospitable soil. Two indigenous Australian children, Max (Hazel Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart), are separated from their mother, and they work under the harsh rule of their 'master', Billy (Matt Nable). When the master is surreptitiously gone (in a manner that reminds one of a sinister version of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'), the two children separate. They unite again -meeting another outcast and homely servant, Philomac (Pedrea Jackson, in a terrific, quiet performance), in the services of another white master, Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright). At the same time, separated from her children, the almost silent Pansy (Deborah Mailman) navigates the Australian outback with her protector, leaving traces of her presence.
But that is not everything. Two other outlaws find those children, worse than all the masters previously encountered. In a narrative that struggles to signal an epic feel (yet is curiously set at 100 minutes only), the various episodes, welcome as they are on their own, reveal a spurious inconsistency. 'Wolfram' feels like all the cultural and historical representation battles have to be fought within its confines. Because of the dexterity of its director, and the editing that skillfully feels like an open space for intepretation is always there (when in reality everything is conceptually programmed from the start), the film feels like a more gruesome, less philosophical execution of well-intended tropes; the bad ones have to be bad, and the young and innocent ones have to survive at all cost. That said, the film has its share of scares, and its more gruesome moments are well-placed to signal that this is a more raw Western than Ford or Roeg would have made of the material.
Because of the well-meant but not sufficiently fleshed-out character traits, some characters struggle to leave their mostly limited shells (the main example is Pansy); the absence of music is well modulated, but the ending (and its song) doesn't feel earned; it feels imposed instead.
Which doesn't imply that 'Wolfram' doesn't unite, indeed; its 'half-breed' theme is everywhere in the film, and its need for the coexistence of the various players, perhaps some of them in better incarnations (the Chinese wolfram miners here), is prominent. It just never comes out as a flesh-and-blood testament of exploitation or suffering, watching its characters from a rather safe (but still enjoyable and never boring) instance. Thornton is a filmmaker who always goes for a strong grip on his theme; here, we see it in flashes (like Pansy's distorted flashbacks) rather than in the whole, continuous film.
Vassilis Kroustallis
'Wolfram' screens in the 76th Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
Vassilis Kroustallis
