Wolfram review – Warwick Thornton’s sequel to Sweet Country never quite comes together

<p>Set four years after Thornton’s blistering neo-western, this film is impressively atmospheric and has strong performances, though Deborah Mailman is criminally underused</p><p>Nobody came away from Warwick Thornton’s 2017 masterpiece <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/24/warwick-thornton-on-sweet-country-australia-is-ready-for-films-like-this">Sweet Country</a> 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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/11/samson-and-delilah-rewatching-classic-australian-films">Samson and Delilah</a> 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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jun/07/warwick-thornton-racists-have-ruined-the-southern-cross-for-everyone">We Don’t Need a Map</a>; the enigmatic religious allegory <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/06/the-new-boy-review-cate-blanchett-doesnt-dazzle-in-warwick-thorntons-enigmatic-film">The New Boy</a>; and even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/dec/15/firebite-review-warwick-thorntons-exhilarating-vampire-series-will-have-you-hooked">Firebite</a>, a criminally under-appreciated vampire series set in the opal mines of Coober Pedy.</p><p>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