Outback drama that makes the cinema shake
Sweet Country
15 Cert, 113 min
★★★★★
Dir Warwick Thornton; Starring: Hamilton Morris, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown, Natassia Gorey Furber, Shanika Cole, Ewen Leslie, Thomas M Wright, Tremayne Doolan, Trevon Doolan
Early in Sweet Country, we glimpse an Aboriginal girl slumped at the side of a horse-drawn wagon, face plastered in blood, eyes glazed in grief. It is not clear whose blood it is, or even when this is: only moments ago we were watching the same girl, whose name is Lucy (Shanika Cole), riding in the same wagon with Fred Smith (Sam Neill), a preacher who employs her uncle and aunt as farmhands on his dust-blown Central Australian homestead. Then the camera cuts away and suddenly Lucy is in the wagon with Fred again, while her uncle Sam (Hamilton Morris) and aunt Lizzie (Natassia Gorey Furber) look on with apprehension – perhaps dimly aware of this awful event hanging in the air, yet to unfold. The glimpse was a premonition. The blood is as good as spilt. Fate already has its ducks lined up.
Warwick Thornton’s majestic, Twenties-set outback western does quite a bit of this – momentarily slipping backwards or forwards in time to show us characters as they once were or are yet to be, like echoes bouncing back from canyon walls. Written down it sounds disorienting, but in practice it is mesmerisingly intuitive – and an inspired means of expressing on film the Aboriginal sense of time as a circular pattern, rather than a linear path. A little foresight puts us at an advantage too: the country might be staggeringly beautiful, but it is also stark and merciless, particularly on the white settlers scratching out their lives from one day to the next on land that refuses to be tamed.
This is Thornton’s first feature since his 2009 debut Samson and Delilah, and it delivers on every last scrap of that earlier film’s enormous promise. Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone: even its soundtrack is nothing more than a natural background chorus, plus one solitary Johnny Cash. It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.