The latest film from Warwick Thornton possesses both shocking cruelty and haunting beauty with its tragic tale of tensions in the outback

Sweet Country is Old Testament cinema, with an almost biblical starkness in its cruelty and mysterious beauty, set in a burning plain where it looks as if the sun-bleached jawbone of an ass could at any moment be picked up and used as a murder weapon.

The director, Warwick Thornton, is an Australian film-maker who made a superb debut with Samson and Delilah in 2009 and now raises his game still further with this brutally powerful outback western, written by Steven McGregor and David Tranter and set in the 1920s Northern Territory. It’s a place where white men are traumatised by the heat, hardship and memories of serving the motherland in the first world war, and where Indigenous Australians are treated with casual racism as virtual plantation field-hands,...