Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aboriginal boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.
Walkabout is most celebrated for Nicolas Roeg's extraordinary cinematography — the Australian outback is rendered with hallucinatory, sun-baked beauty and deeply unsettling visual poetry that remains iconic. Its novelty is high: Roeg's fragmented, elliptical editing style and the film's meditation on civilisation versus nature give it a wholly distinctive voice. The plot is spare and episodic by design, which serves the mood but limits conventional narrative momentum. Acting is quietly effective — Jenny Agutter carries a great deal with minimal dialogue — but is not the film's primary achievement. The ending, with its melancholy flashback structure, is evocative but somewhat abrupt and ambiguous in ways that feel unresolved rather than intentionally open. Overall a singular, visually ravishing art film.