‘Wolfram’ Berlinale Review: Searching for Freedom in a Stolen Land

Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton returns to the universe of his most widely known film, Sweet Country, with another frontier story steeped in brutality, racism, and the systemic cruelty inflicted upon Australia’s Indigenous communities. Set along the colonial edge of the outback in the 1930s, Wolfram unfolds through an ensemble of intersecting perspectives. At its center are two Aboriginal children –Max (Hazel Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart)– forced into labor by white landowners who seize the opportunity to flee across the desert when a pair of swaggering outlaws –Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird)– descend upon their remote mining settlement with violently predatory intent. As their mother escapes separately in search of them, another young Indigenous man becomes the latest victim of the same marauding drifters, whose presence exposes the impunity with which such violence circulates in these lawless zones.

Gradually, Wolfram assembles a narrative architecture that begins to resemble a distorted mirror of contemporary society. Bonds of solidarity emerge between Indigenous groups subjected to varying forms of dispossession and assault by landowners and opportunistic criminals alike—dynamics that feel less like historical reconstruction than ongoing reality. The children’s trek through an unforgiving landscape becomes not just a physical escape but a search for precarious networks of care in a world where survival often depends on finding a slightly less brutal master to work for. Along the way, Chinese immigrants—brought in as labor and themselves subjected to racialized suspicion—attempt to carve out a livelihood, navigating parallel structures of exclusion with marginally greater resources for resistance.

Operating within the visual grammar of a Western—albeit transplanted to the Australian outback—Thornton’s film ultimately centers on the fragile communal frameworks that allow its young protagonists to endure in the absence of institutional justice. What drives the narrative forward is less the threat of the outlaws than the systemic indifference of a legal order that refuses to intervene. Thornton avoids overtly drawing parallels with the present day, but as the film progresses, its allegorical undercurrents become increasingly difficult to ignore.

And yet, for all its thematic ambition, Wolfram never quite coheres as drama. Dispersed across multiple settings, populated by underdeveloped characters whose motivations often feel arbitrary, the film lacks the narrative clarity and emotional force that distinguished Sweet Country. As with Eddington, this is a project that leans heavily on the iconography and methodological scaffolding of the Western without consistently achieving its structural or dramatic payoff—save for a handful of striking sequences that hint at the more compelling film it might have been.