Film Review: Wilderness – Glam Adelaide

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Wilderness beautifully captures the Victorian high country in an engaging story about loss and grief while also incorporating an important environmental message.

Australian TV stalwart Martin McKenna’s second feature film, Wilderness, beautifully captures the Victorian high country in an engaging story about loss and grief while also incorporating an important environmental message.

In Wilderness, medical doctor Allie’s (Mirrah Foulkes) life is in crisis, her husband is having an affair and she is drinking herself to sleep on the couch. She decides to go to work early and get some sleep on one of the treatment beds but she sets off the alarm system and is discovered by the building’s security officers. Her colleague warns her that her job is in danger.

At home she prepares for a trip away to a lake park that was her father’s favourite place to go when she was a child. After packing her bag and the dog in the car she deliberately reverses into her husband’s car, containing her daughter, causing a dent to his car. Satisfied with the damage she is inattentive to the road and is involved in a crash with another vehicle. While standing next to her damaged car her estranged former best friend, Kaz (Yael Stone), unexpectedly pulls up next to her in her aging campervan and offers Allie a ride to the lake as Kaz is headed that way anyway to do some work recording the wilderness. Allie accepts the ride as an opportunity to fix their relationship. However, as the trip continues perhaps everything is not how it seems.

McKenna has worked as either a writer or director of just about everything made for television over the years, Packed to the Rafters, All Saints, Neighbours, Blue Heelers, just to name a few, and over that time he has obviously developed a sense of what is a good story which he applies well in Wilderness incorporating an interesting twist point. He also highlights an important environmental message through Kaz’s work recording the sounds of the wilderness to illustrate the shrinking population of fauna in delicate eco-systems. This is a theme McKenna returns to a number of times through the film.

Cinematographer Ellery Ryan, also with a long credits list, wonderfully captures the Victorian high country in what at times must have been challenging. Robert Murray Jamieson’s  score also augments the film especially in the road trip and country pub parts.

Foulkes and Stone act well in their roles. Foulkes performance in the first part of the film makes sense as the plot develops. George Mason and Grace Jackson, as Allie’s daughter Jess, also deliver first-rate performances 

Wilderness screened as part of this year’s Adelaide Film Festival.

More information about the Adelaide Film Festival is available here: