Sweet Country review: an Aussie western as stark, merciless and majestic as the Outback itself

Director: Warwick Thornton; Starring: Hamilton Morris, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown, Natassia Gorey Furber, Shanika Cole, Ewen Leslie, Thomas M Wright, Tremayne Doolan, Trevon Doolan. 15 cert, 113 mins.

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 spilled. Fate already has its ducks lined up. 

Warwick Thornton’s majestic, 1920s-set outback western does quite a bit of this – momentarily slipping backwards or forwards through 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.

One particularly sorry example is Harry March (Ewen Leslie), a First World War veteran riddled with post-traumatic stress, who moves onto a cattle station close to Fred’s ranch. He takes an immediate, racist dislike to Sam, even as he leers at his wife and niece.

When the tension between the foursome comes to a bloody head, Sam and Lizzie flee into the wilderness, where they survive on Aboriginal lore handed down from generations past. Enter lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) who pulls together a small posse to track down the fugitives and bring them back to the nearby town, where justice – or at least something that looks a bit like it – will be served. 

Fletcher is joined in the task by preacher Smith, along with a white farmer called Mick Kennedy (Thomas M Wright) and his hapless Aboriginal stockman Archie, played by Gibson John – one of many nonprofessional actors on Thornton’s cast who give outstanding, finely modulated performances in chewy character roles.

Kennedy is almost as much of a virulent racist as March, but with different complicating factors in his past: he is the unacknowledged father of a “half-caste” boy called Philomac (played by twin brothers Tremayne and Trevon Doolan), whom he treats worse than a dog, beating him violently with his belt at the slightest excuse. Philomac’s own story cleverly snakes in and out of the central plot, getting the conditions just right for the film’s ambiguous, unsettling final moments, in which a newly hoisted-up cross suggests salvation may be anything but close at hand.

This is Thornton’s first feature since his 2009 debut Samson and Delilah – though the time in between has been peppered with documentaries, shorts and other projects – and it delivers on every last scrap of that earlier film’s enormous promise.

It may have been inspired by actual events in Central Australia in the 1920s, but it has the sweeping poetry of classic John Ford, with the same preoccupation with the way frontier life can reshape the human soul in its surroundings’ image. The settlers here are so stained by the ground around them, they look as if they’re sweating dirt – just as the landscape itself seems to be trying to sweat them out in turn, like the new white western order is a fever that won’t break.

Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone: even its soundtrack is nothing more than a natural background chorus of insects and birdsong, plus one solitary Johnny Cash track that plays over the closing credits.

It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.