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

N obody came away from Warwick Thornton’s 2017 masterpiece Sweet Country 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 Samson and Delilah 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 We Don’t Need a Map ; the enigmatic religious allegory The New Boy ; and even Firebite , a criminally under-appreciated vampire series set in the opal mines of Coober Pedy.

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, o