The Tracker

Summary: 7/10: patient, unconventional filmmaking that earns its deliberate pace and rewards those willing to meet it on its own terms.

This is a film of historical memory, examining the brutal treatment of Australian Aboriginals by invading British colonizers. Director Rolf de Heer sets his story in 1922, when an Aboriginal tracker leads three white policemen in pursuit of another Aboriginal man accused of murdering a white woman. The film's significance extends beyond its historical setting; some one million First Peoples of Australia are still fighting for recognition and status today, making this portrait of colonial violence and complicity uncomfortably relevant.

This is not a movie for the impatient. It's long, very slow, accompanied throughout by slow ballads sung by Archie Roach that function as both commentary and lament. The film is obviously low budget; de Heer uses painted stills instead of special effects when violence occurs, a deliberate artistic choice that disrupts the usual place violent scenes occupy in cinema. There's no payoff for viewers seeking the thrill of gore; instead, each killing becomes instant history, memorialized rather than sensationalized.

Yet somehow, once you accept the pace and style, the film reveals itself as very good indeed. Four men, six relationships, all of them shaped by power, race, and moral compromise. The Tracker (David Gulpilil) leads; The Fanatic (Gary Sweet) commands with brutal authority; The Follower (Damon Gameau) observes with growing horror; The Veteran (Grant Page) knows too much to be shocked anymore. The acting is entirely believable, each performer inhabiting their role with restraint and conviction.

And the landscapes are genuinely amazing. The Australian outback has never been captured quite like this, vast and pitiless and beautiful, a country that holds its secrets and doesn't forgive. De Heer's vision earned the film a place in Official Competition at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, competing for the Golden Lion. For the acting, the story, Archie Roach's haunting ballads, and those extraordinary landscapes, this deserves recognition as an important work of cinema that refuses easy answers or comfortable distance from Australia's colonial violence.