Written and directed by Martin McKenna, Wilderness is a baffling and mishandled film that chooses to focus more on suburban woes than ecological reverence. When a Melbourne doctor spirals toward a midlife crisis and reunites with her erstwhile best friend, a bizarre trip to the Victorian Alps struggles to make sense of their splintered relationship and shared past. With stale performances and a graceless script, not even the gorgeous vistas of Victoria’s High Country can save the film from feeling contrived, clunky, and cumbersome.
Allie (Mirrah Foulkes) is a suburban mum and doctor in metropolitan Melbourne. She’s not having a good time in her life: her husband is having an affair, she’s sleeping on the couch, and her affluent lifestyle is falling apart. When she deliberately crashes into the front of her husband’s car, notably while her dog Stanley is in the car with her, she drives off in a frantic state of frustration and rage. Too bad that, directly after driving off, she finds herself involved in a serious car accident. Allie escapes the immediate consequences of her reckless state, driving away in her heavily damaged car and refusing to look back.
While parked on the side of the road, a chance encounter with her ex-best friend Kaz (Yael Stone) changes Allie’s entire trajectory. Kaz is a sound recordist and a staunch environmentalist, recording as much audio as she can to prove biodiversity degradation in Australian ecosystems. At Kaz’s suggestion, Allie ditches her wrecked car, gets in Kaz’s caravan, and the two set out on a country road trip—a pilgrimage away from Allie’s home, her husband, and her teenage daughter. What unfurls next is a thinly plotted narrative as the two women attempt to unpack their lives and their fraught relationship.
The biggest problem of Wilderness is the poor characterisation of Allie. McKenna writes her primal escape as a form of celebratory unshackling, but does little to make her feel relatable, likeable, or grounded. This is not to say a badly behaved mother facing a midlife crisis is an unworthy narrative perspective, but her affluence, delusion, and selfishness provide next to nothing to make her sympathetic to the audience.
From the start to the end of the film, Allie disregards Kaz’s respect for the environment, recklessly demands things without any manners, and makes even the most touching moments in the film all about her urban squabbles. A chance encounter with bar-going Will (George Mason) also feels entirely contradictory to her beliefs. When the audience finally finds out what drove Kaz and Allie’s friendship apart, it’ll be odd if you don’t scoff in bewilderment.
Martin McKenna’s script does little to expand on its themes of environmentalism, loss, and connection. In its final act, the film resorts to one of the laziest tropes a writer could employ, a decision that is also all too easy to guess. Yael Stone does what she can to give Kaz some dimension beyond her stereotypical ‘hippie activist’ characterisation, while Mirrah Foulkes doubles down on Allie’s stubborn lack of self-reflection. An obtuse coda near the end makes the film’s intentions around environmental preservation clear, but its main throughline is lost amid Allie’s privileged and emotionally draining problems.
The strongest and most tender elements of the film lie in the cinematography by Ellery Ryan. Multiple shots linger strikingly on the natural sprawl of the Victorian Alps, taking the time to slow down as Kaz pulls out her microphone to record the ecological beauty around her. One particularly emotive sequence finds Kaz and Allie in a cavern full of endangered moths—a reminder to both Kaz and the viewer of how bountiful and enduring Australia’s landscape was pre-colonisation. It’s unfortunate that even these genuine story beats are undercut by Allie making fun of Kaz’s profession and steering the conversation back to herself.
Wilderness is an ill-conceived Australian drama that struggles to broaden its inconsistent message to a wider audience. Featuring stale direction, second-rate writing, and staggeringly out-of-touch characterisations, Martin Mckenna’s ode to fractured connection and environmental ruin is both confounding and unfocused. For a film that beckons us all to escape the city and reclaim our connection to the planet, it’s a shame Wilderness chooses to remain focused on the material rather than the natural.
Wilderness is now showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival
