Nobody came away from Warwick Thornton’s 2017 masterpiece Sweet Country thinking “this film needs a sequel” – but the Kaytetye auteur has never walked the expected path. He launched his feature career with the viscerally powerful, social realist drama Samson and Delilah and has since roamed freely across forms and genres, directing works as varied as the hybrid ghost-themed documentary The Dark Side; the wry, politically charged We Don’t Need a Map; the enigmatic religious allegory The New Boy; and even Firebite, a criminally under-appreciated vampire series set in the opal mines of Coober Pedy.
We’ve been conditioned to expect the unexpected. So perhaps it’s not all that surprising that Wolfram – the closing-night film of this year’s Adelaide film festival – is a sequel, or (as the festival guide calls it) a “follow-up”, to Sweet Country. That earlier film, a blistering neo-western about an Indigenous farmhand (Hamilton Morris) who shoots a white man in self-defence and is doggedly pursued by a police sergeant (Bryan Brown), 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.
