Warwick Thornton’s fiercely original outback Western, Wolfram, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and is being hailed as a modern Australian classic. The film, set in the 1930s Red Centre, saturates viewers in heatwave colours and simmering menace, painting a grim, lawless backwater that makes Wake in Fright seem cosmopolitan.
The title refers to tungsten, more valuable than gold at the time. The story follows pioneer Billy (Matt Nable), who mines the metal with the help of two abducted children, Max and Kid. Billy is a brutal taskmaster, and when Max returns from a mine shaft almost empty-handed, Billy erupts, foreshadowing the film’s explosive violence.
Two enigmatic strangers, Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird), ride into town, bringing palpable dread. The narrative unfolds in seemingly unrelated sequences: Billy dies from a snake bite; Indigenous woman Pansy (Deborah Mailman) and her Chinese partner Zhang (Jason Chong) are introduced. The mystery deepens at the ranch of the reclusive Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), who treats his mixed-race son Philomac (Pedrea Jackson) with contempt but shows strange loyalty to Casey.
The threads converge when Casey and Frank take Max, unaware that Kid is in pursuit. In this world, theft grants ownership, and it transpires that Billy had abducted Max and Kid from Pansy, who is guilt-ridden as she travels to a new life. Philomac snaps, escapes with the boys, and Casey and Frank pursue them in a vengeance mission that echoes The Searchers. The film also highlights Chinese pioneers, a nod to spaghetti Westerns.
Wolfram merges serious social comment with taut action, exploring toxic white colonialism and base cruelty. Yet, true to Thornton’s humanist roots (Samson and Delilah), the film gives the last word to the underdogs with an ingenious twist that pays off its opacity. Australian cinema may have found a modern classic.
