WOLFRAM
- Colin Fraser
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
THREE AND A HALF STARS A mother is searching for her missing kids who've been forced to work in a Northern Terriotry mind. A young man tries to get them to safety.
DRAMA AUSTRALIA English #WOLFRAM Starring Pedrea Jackson, Deborah Mailman
Warwick Thornton’s WOLFRAM opens draped in red dust, moral outrage and the his signature visual style - vast, sweeping, gorgeously framed vistas. As a loose companion piece to SWEET COUNTRY, this 1930s frontier drama reaches for something sprawling and elegiac; and while it doesn’t always land with the force it intends, it remains a compelling work from one of Australia’s singular filmmakers. The craft is undeniable even if the storytelling loses force along the way.
Set against the brutal backdrop of the Northern Territory’s wolfram (tungsten) mining boom and the exploitation that accompanied it, indigenous children Max and Kid are forced into labour while their mother (a woefully underused Deborah Mailman), embarks on a determined search for them. Running alongside before intersecting their story is Philomac, a young man who carves out his own path amid the cruelty of settler rule. It’s a story of survival, displacement and endurance that Thorton stitches together as a kind of historical chase film with conscience.
He directs like a man who knows the land better than the mapmakers ever did. Every frame is sun-scorched and deliberate. The result is undeniably striking — the outback is rendered with a stark beauty that feels both majestic and unforgiving. The desert doesn’t just sit in the background; it looms, judges and occasionally swallows his characters. The price of this beauty is uneven pacing, as though the film is so intent on mood that it forgets momentum.
What keeps WOLFRAM grounded is Pedrea Jackson, whose performance as Philomac has a quiet complexity that holds the film together even when its structure becomes fragmented. There is intelligence and restraint in his work, and he carries much of the emotional burden with ease. Mailman, on the other hand, is left with far too little to do. She brings dignity and feeling to Pansy, but frustratingly, the role never expands enough to match her capabilities. She’s not miscast, just underused. In Mailman’s case this feels borderline criminal.
As the story progresses, separate narratives converge into a pursuit driven, more focused and urgent second half. Outlaws Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird) take centre stage with an axe or two to grind, and they do so with a skin-crawling sense of dread. What had felt like a fragmented collection of stories becomes a broader reckoning with colonial violence and inherited trauma. It’s here that WOLFRAM finds its emotional stride, though some resolutions are tied off a touch too neatly for material this morally complex.
Good, certainly. Important, yes. Great? Not quite. But even a middling Warwick Thornton effort is more interesting than most filmmakers’ career peaks.
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