WOLFRAM

White Australians now conduct themselves with a kind of rabid, vicious colonial madness, embodied potently by Casey and Frank. They kill and torment the Indigenous people they encounter, not from some moral position, but from an ingrained racism and superiority that they relish, and with total confidence that their actions will have no consequences for them. In many ways, death was a controlled process in 'Sweet Country', while in 'Wolfram', it is random and unprovoked. You can see this in both Philomac and Mick from the moment Casey and Frank ride onto their property. This new world order is unpredictable and intensely dangerous for both coloniser and colonised, with the relationship between them having shifted again. For Philomac and the two kids, this threat is obvious, the building certainty of violence, but even Mick must fall in line with Casey's sadism, otherwise reveal himself as a traitor to White Australia.

And crawling over all of them, over every living thing, over every object and surface...are flies, endless swarms of flies. At first they feel like just a texture, but as they build across the film, they become an intentional reflection of the change that has begun to occur. In 'Wolfram', Thornton depicts Australia as a landscape of rotting corpses, a land of casual death. So many scenes are dotted with dead bodies, whether they be animals or people, often First Nations people, and in so many cases, these are old corpses, left to rot where they landed. The ground they all walk and ride on, that we walk and ride on, is an endless graveyard. There's a sense of their accumulation, that the brutality that was once accepted yet regulated is now allowed to occur in plain sight.

Thornton is careful in the way he depicts that brutality. Any moments of extreme violence inflicted on First Nations characters occur off-screen, a pointed choice when the western tropes the film borrows from often revel in the misery of the antagonistic "other". Their suffering is not for our entertainment. In fact, Thornton flips it, instead sitting in the maiming and suffering of the White Australian characters, including a protracted and painful death of one. In that sense, he reframes them as the antagonistic "other", which, historically speaking, they are. Like the constant presence of the flies, it's a subtle piece of social and cinematic commentary, remarking on the film's thematic and historical undertones while also critiquing the genre tropes it engages in. The American Western, at its best, is as much a comment on the nature of U.S. identity as it is a tale of man struggling in a remote landscape. It makes sense, then, that the genre has found such a strong footing in Australian cinema, particularly among First Nations filmmakers like Thornton. It provides space for a pointed and angry response to the mistreatment of Indigenous people in Australia, dressed in the garb of hyper-masculine and hyper-nationalist entertainment that it so beautifully subverts.

In many ways, 'Wolfram' is more conventional in execution and structure than 'Sweet Country'. The narrative moves with greater forward thrust, and the plot remains mostly linear, devoid of the startling time slippages that made the first film so exciting. This doesn't work against the film, though. Whereas the tension of 'Sweet Country' comes from a sense of narrative certainty, here it lies in its unpredictability, which necessitates moving cleanly from one significant action set piece to another. Even Thornton's visual classicism shifts a bit; his cinematography is slightly more chaotic and immediate. The outback he is depicting here is wilder than in his previous film, and the filmmaking reflects this.

The emotional heart of the film lies with the distance between the two siblings and Pansy, and Philomac's determination to reunite them. The obvious subtext here is the horror of the Stolen Generation, the policy of removing First Nations children from their families. By the time of 'Wolfram' this is already underway, and while the kidnapping of the two children isn't institutional, the sense of displacement both they and their mother feel, both from each other and from Country, feels thematically aligned. Similarly to 'The New Boy', Thornton is in a way looking at this catastrophic event through the lens of a fable or myth - in this case, the journey to home and family. There's even an episodic quality, Philomac and the kids encountering different communities and overcoming specific challenges in their journey. The most significant of these sees them cross paths with two Asian immigrants (Ferdinand Hoang, 'Mao's Last Dancer', and Aidan Du Chiem), themselves trying to mine for wolfram. This allows Thornton to further subvert the concept of the "other" in this western, with the two immigrants initially seeing Philomac and the kids as inherently inferior labourers before uniting in their shared battle against Casey and Frank. This fable-like quality leads to a powerful yet pointed ending that, with the rest of the film, invites interrogation about how the images we're seeing relate to our understanding of the nightmare of the Stolen Generation.

As is always the case with Thornton's work, the performances across the board are terrific. Errol Shand and Joe Bird bring such a palpable, disgusting menace to Casey and Frank, an unbridled texture of unchecked, belligerent, entitled masculinity that even offends the other white characters they meet. It's easy to play evil, but it's another thing entirely to play cold and dangerous, and both do so beautifully. Thomas M. Wright provides a useful bridge between the two films, and in many ways, he helps us chart how much has changed in the four years, giving Mick a sense of devastating befuddlement at how quickly this barbarism has grown around him. Deborah Mailman is as radiant as ever as Pansy, and this is weaponised beautifully with how little time she has on screen. She becomes the beacon of hope on the horizon, even though she barely has any hope for herself. The standout of the cast, however, is Pedrea Jackson, taking over the role of Philomac from Tremayne Doolan. He brings immense gravitas and power to every scene, a sense of a spring wound to the breaking point. Philomac is the most complex character of the film, pulled between loyalty to his culture and loyalty to his father. Jackson navigates that conflict beautifully and with immense intelligence. Hopefully, this means a healthy, exciting career for Jackson, launched by tremendous work in this major Australian film.

And at every turn, Thornton continues to display the same level of precision and control that has long made him one of our greatest contemporary filmmakers. Even with the looser, more conventional structure, there's always a sense that every choice has purpose, that every element of the mise-en-scene is there to unlock another aspect of colonial horror. It would have been disappointing in hindsight if 'Wolfram' had too much resembled 'Sweet Country' in tone and texture, and in a way, 'Wolfram' has just as much in common with the magic realism of 'The New Boy', the careful reduction of complex systems of collective inherited trauma into simple tales of human beings facing monstrous adversity. After questioning whether 'Sweet Country' needed a sequel, I walked away from 'Wolfram' hoping this would be the new chapter in an ongoing Australian saga, Thornton's First Nations answer to Larry McMurtry's 'Lonesome Dove' or Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. There is so much possibility in Philomac as a character who grows across time, charting the evolution of the many ways White Australia persecuted and traumatised First Nations Australians across the 20th century, through the lens of the western. Whether such a saga eventuates, 'Wolfram' is a worthy sequel to the 2017 masterpiece and an impressive feat of filmmaking of its own.