Wolfram (2025)
Warwick Thornton returns to the red dust of central Australia with Wolfram, and he has not mellowed and which is precisely what this material requires. Sweet Country (2017) announced a filmmaker with a ferocious visual intelligence and a refusal to look at the historical brutality of white settlement in Australia without flinching, and its sequel, set roughly four years later in 1932, shows those instincts have sharpened with time.
Shot in sun-scorched colour, the film earns its beauty. Thornton, working again as his own cinematographer, moves between close-ups so intimate you can almost feel the heat radiating off the skin and panoramic shots so vast the human figures below them seem provisional. An image early on of children being lowered into mine shafts to dig for wolfram (tungsten, to use its more familiar name, highly prized in the thirties) lodges itself in the memory and does not leave.
The story draws from the real family histories of both Thornton and co-writer David Tranter, and follows two Aboriginal siblings, Max and Kid, forced into labour at the Hatches Creek wolfram field in the Northern Territory under the supervision of Billy (Matt Nable), a drunken and volatile miner. When two outlaws, Casey and Frank, ride into town carrying menace the way other men carry luggage, the children are separated from each other and from their mother, Pansy (Deborah Mailman), who sets off across the desert to find them. Several characters from Sweet Country reappear, including Philomac (Pedrea Jackson), now older and carrying a heavier burden still. The narrative divides into four loose sections, and the film takes its time letting them coalesce, occasionally a little too much time, though the patience it demands is generally paid back.
Casey, played by Erroll Shand, is practically a walking thesis statement on colonial brutality: pestilential, unhurried, utterly without remorse. His younger companion Frank is, if anything, more unsettling, his cruelty still forming, and the formation already looks irreversible. Against such figures, the children and Pansy radiate a resilience that never tips into sentimentality. Deborah Mailman, given relatively little dialogue, communicates through a quality of stillness that most screen actors cannot locate at all. In my opinion, it is one of the finer screen performances in recent Australian cinema, the kind that awards bodies tend to file under “dignified restraint” and then not quite get around to rewarding.
Thornton uses the flies as a darkly comic constant; they swarm over everyone indiscriminately, villain and victim alike, as if nature has its own mordant sense of equity. You will find yourself unconsciously brushing at your face. The horse carcass nobody in the town can be bothered removing says rather more about the white community of Henry than any amount of expository dialogue could manage.
Not everything coheres. Some characters feel sketched where they needed filling out, and the four-part structure occasionally strains against a running time of 100 minutes that does not quite accommodate the epic register Thornton seems to be reaching for. A little more room in certain relationships would have served the film well.
Wolfram is a film with genuine reservations attached to it. It’s a work about the deliberate dismantling of family and belonging that does not always find the structural space to develop every character the story requires. But the controlled anger behind it carries real weight, and Thornton withholds editorial comment, letting the camera record without comment. That discipline is, in my opinion, a form of respect both for his subject and for the audience that relatively few directors sustain across a full film.
Wolfram had its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on 26 October 2025, and its international premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2026, where it competed for the Golden Bear. Thornton has made a film that does not resolve what cannot be resolved. The colonial history it depicts is not tidy, and he does not pretend otherwise. That honesty, more than any single scene, is what has stayed with me.