Sweet Country

Dir: Warwick Thornton 1hr 53mins (15)

Once upon a time in the bush

“Australia now has its High Noon,” said Nick Dent in Time Out. This “glorious” western from director Warwick Thornton is set in the wilds of the Northern Territory in the 1920s. Sam Neill plays a kindly preacher who unwisely loans an Aboriginal farmhand called Sam (Hamilton Morris) to his new neighbour, Harry March (Ewen Leslie). March abuses his servants and rapes Sam’s wife, and Sam eventually confronts him, unintentionally kills him and goes on the run. As well as providing “moving insights into the plight of indigenous Australians”, Sweet Country is crammed with enjoyably familiar elements from spaghetti westerns, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent – saloon bar scenes, majestic landscapes and a lawman (Bryan Brown) on Sam’s trail who is “as vicious and unforgiving as Lee Van Cleef”. It all makes for a film of “immense power and pathos”. I can’t understand why so many critics are raving about this film, said Nigel Andrews in the FT. The characterisation lacks nuance; the plot, at once “too busy and too diffuse”, is muddled. And it all ends in a “pother of melodrama”.