Sam­son and Delilah

Film­ing in the sparse ochre sur­round­ings of Alice Springs, War­wick Thorn­ton guides us through the grad­ual dis­in­te­gra­tion of two local teenagers as they slip through the cracks of con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralia in this dust-choked anti-ode to the abo­rig­i­nal experience.

Sam­son (Rowan McNa­ma­ra) and Delilah (Maris­sa Gib­son) are two lost souls bare­ly exist­ing in an iso­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ty in cen­tral Aus­tralia. Where Delilah finds solace in car­ing for her grand­moth­er, a tra­di­tion­al artist ruth­less­ly exploit­ed by white oppor­tunists, Sam­son buries him­self in petrol fumes and his qui­et, dis­tant love. But when Delilah’s grand­moth­er dies, the two seize their chance to escape to the city, only for mat­ters to take sev­er­al turns for the worse.

Both McNa­ma­ra and Gib­son are non-pro­fes­sion­als cho­sen for their inti­mate under­stand­ing of the dra­ma. Rep­re­sent­ing the shat­tered dreams and bro­ken promis­es of an entire gen­er­a­tion, their phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al suf­fer­ing evokes an enor­mous pathos. Dia­logue is kept to the barest min­i­mum, and though nei­ther actor could be described as par­tic­u­lar­ly expres­sive, their grad­ual with­draw­al into them­selves and away from each oth­er is beau­ti­ful­ly conducted.

Though the char­ac­ter arc recalls Dar­ren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Sam­son and Delilah isn’t all grit­ty real­ism. A for­mer cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, Thorn­ton injects a gruff lyri­cism into the film, cap­tur­ing the sup­ple spec­trum of light and heat that spits and siz­zles in the fry­ing pan of the Aus­tralian Out­back. He cre­ates a sense of hyp­not­ic ener­va­tion that per­fect­ly cap­tures the exhaust­ed despon­den­cy of two teenagers whose lives are dwin­dling into non-existence.

Thornton’s com­mand of space, loca­tion and mood is exem­plary, recall­ing the Tai­wanese mas­ter Tsai-ming Liang in the way this love sto­ry plays out in the inter­sti­tial spaces of the city. Wreathed in pro­found silence, we hear noth­ing but learn every­thing about these two young people.

After a cav­al­cade of mis­for­tune – much of which is gen­uine­ly dif­fi­cult to watch, and impos­si­ble to rec­on­cile your­self to – the film’s end­ing may strike some as insin­cere. But in com­ing full cir­cle and return­ing to the bar­ren beau­ty of Alice Springs, Thorn­ton deft­ly invests the rou­tines and tra­di­tions of the local com­mu­ni­ty with an almost mytho­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. Mean­ing may be a deval­ued cur­ren­cy in the lives of these kids, but it briefly glit­ters like gold.