Sweet Country movie review & film summary (2018)
As he works with Sam Kelly, March evinces a morbid interest in the lifestyle of the indigenous man. “You marry ‘em young around here, don’t you?” March says, referring to the younger woman in Harris’ household. No, Harris says; that’s his niece.
After closing all the shutters in a house on his ranch the better to rape Sam Harris’ wife, March tells her: “I wanted the other one, but you’ll do.”
You might say March has it coming, and he certainly does, but when he gets it, from Sam Harris, who is eventually driven to shoot March in self-defense, the sense of justice is short-lived. One understands that terrible things are likely to happen to Sam now. He goes on the run, another war veteran who’s now the local law, a Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) is summoned, and a miniature posse, including Fred Smith, who’s going along to make sure Sam is captured and brought back alive.
But these “white fellas” have not got a clue what they’re in for as they trail Sam into his own country. The aborigines who haven’t made peace, let alone maybe ever seen, white settlers, prove a swift and persistent danger, not just to Fletcher and company but to Sam and his wife. Then there are the elements, including a great salt desert (or so it appears to be) which is the setting for one of the movie’s most hallucinatory scenes, a shudderingly gorgeous mixture of beauty and dread.
For all that, on return Fletcher tells the barmaid whom he wants to settle down with that he saw a lot of “sweet country” on his quest. This is a movie of visuals first and foremost; it’s no fluke that director Warwick Thornton shared cinematography duties with Dylan River. In addition to capturing stunning images, Thornton has a sleight-of-hand maestro’s joy in shuffling and fanning them. Lightning-fast cuts to flashbacks and flash-forwards keep the viewer on his or her toes in a bracing fashion. The words of Steven McGregor and David Tranter’s script stay out of the way, except when they don’t, particularly at the movie’s end, which yields an anguished line from one of the characters that’s on the nose to the point of self-parody.
