Berlinale: With "Wolfram" Warwick Thornton finally strikes gold

by Elisa Giudici

For a filmmaker long associated with the Australian western, Warwick Thornton has often seemed trapped inside his own obsessions. Film after film has returned to the same harsh landscapes, the same colonial fault lines, the same story of Aboriginal endurance under white domination — sometimes with conviction, often with diminishing returns. With Wolfram, however, something finally coheres. After several disappointments, Thornton delivers his strongest work in years, perhaps decades: a film that feels less like repetition and more like arrival.

The title refers to tungsten, mined with pickaxes, dynamite, and small hands nimble enough to pry metal from rock. Those hands belong to Max and Kid, two Aboriginal kids forced to labor underground for Billy, a white man who oscillates between surrogate father and exploiter...

That blurred paternal dynamic recurs throughout the film: Aboriginal children and young men “cared for” by white adults who are also their owners. We later encounter Pedrea Jackson's Philomac (a character Thornton introduced in Sweet Country) now cooking and tending to another unstable white employer. The pattern is clear: assimilation masquerading as protection.

Set in early twentieth-century Australia, the film again stages Thornton’s enduring theme: Indigenous resistance within a colonial western framework. But where Sweet Country and the more recent The New Boy (with Cate Blanchett as a missionary nun) sometimes drifted into solemnity, Wolfram finds propulsion. It may not be a direct sequel to Sweet Country, but it operates as a spiritual heir, and a far more vital one.

The difference begins with perspective. Centering largely on the two boys, Thornton transforms what might have been another austere colonial parable into something closer to an adventure story. Torn from their parents and later separated amid white violence, the boys embark (directly or indirectly) on parallel journeys. One follows the stubborn mule pointedly named “Mr. Donkey” in search of his brother, while their parents scour nearby towns and white criminals circle with their own agendas.

Crucially, the children’s point of view recalibrates the tone. Danger is ever-present - the mines, the outlaws, the vast terrain - but so is wonder. The boys remain recognizably children, capable of play and awe even while navigating systemic brutality. That tonal counterpoint is what the earlier films lacked. Here, innocence doesn’t sentimentalize the violence; it refracts it.

Thornton, an Aboriginal filmmaker with deep ties to the Kaytetye people, again foregrounds nonverbal communication. His Indigenous characters speak sparingly but communicate through gesture, glances, and objects embedded in the land itself. The mother leaves talismans fashioned from her own hair; signals of presence, markers of territory, proof of pursuit. By the film’s conclusion, we understand more clearly what is being protected, and from whom.

Opposing them are two white drifters, played with grimy relish by Erroll Shand and Joe Bird, criminals so disreputable they unsettle even the saloon regulars. Their relationship carries an uneasy quasi-filial tension, mirroring the film’s broader preoccupation with distorted parenthood. In Wolfram, true parents search for their children while surrogate figures warp or weaponize dependency. Around them unfolds the familiar grammar of the western: saloons, horseback travel (and mule stubbornness), gunshots punctuating spit-laced dialogue, moral codes tested under open sky.

What separates this film from its predecessors is its emotional calibration. In Sweet Country, the weight of experience belonged largely to an older Aboriginal protagonist, fully conscious of his subjugated status within white society. The film was thoughtful but heavy. Here, although an older figure briefly echoes that earlier narrative, the emphasis rests on solidarity — a quiet network of Indigenous resistance stretching across terrain and circumstance. The film becomes less a lament than a sustained act of communal endurance.

Thornton, who acts as both director and cinematographer on his films, visually tempers some of his previous indulgences . The Australian landscape remains present but less fetishized while the storytelling momentum keeps it grounded. If certain stylistic flourishes in past films veered toward the precious, here they feel earned. Even the close-ups of wide, watchful children’s eyes (once bordering on sentimental) become the emotional hinge of the finale. The ending wavers slightly before landing, but not enough to undo the film’s cumulative force.

Programmed at Berlin alongside the other Depression-era survival thriller The Weight, Wolfram the films unexpectedly harmonize: families separated, characters navigating treacherous environments to reunite with loved ones. While The Weight features a debut filmmaker discovering his voice, Thornton arrives as a veteran who has tested these images and themes repeatedly. What feels new is not subject matter but synthesis. After years of circling the same terrain, Thornton finally locates the balance his cinema has sought — between myth and immediacy, between political testimony and genre propulsion. Whether this represents serendipity or maturation remains to be seen. What is clear is that Wolfram finds a formal and emotional equilibrium his previous efforts lacked.

In a moment when classical genre filmmaking is quietly resurging, this old-fashioned, rigorously constructed western stands as proof that repetition can evolve into refinement. Thornton has been telling this story for years. Here, at last, he tells it right.

Editor's Note: If you're unfamiliar with Thornton's previous work his most famous films are the Oscar shortlisted Best International Feature submission Samson & Delilah (2009), the APSA Best Film winner Sweet Country (2017), and the American Society of Cinematographer's "Spotlight" winner The New Boy (2023) which featured Cate Blanchett as a missionary nun.

Other Reviews From 2026 Berlinale

• Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die, No Good Men, A Prayer for the Dying
• Everybody Digs Bill, Dao, In a Whisper
• The Weight
• Rosebush Pruning