Critics reviews

Pristine and accessible when it should be challenging, dirty and bold, Tracks evokes this incredible woman's fairly insane adventure, but fails to really smack its audience round the gob. Beautiful landscapes are all well and good, but this is one film that really could've done with a touch of crazy.

The film's final moments of underwater photography reveal an expression of peace on the protagonist's face but left me with unanswered questions about how the quest had changed her. Tracks takes the viewer on an engaging journey with a fiercely independent young woman, leaving us to further contemplate the protagonist's motives for undertaking such a dangerous and lonely task.

Curran's willingness to let the images carry the story marks a shrewd change of tactics after the intermittently impressive but over-determined Stone and The Painted Veil... Wasikowska is inspired casting, evincing intelligence and naïveté, determination and desperation, resourcefulness and vulnerability; her Robyn remains fixed on proving something to herself even if she isn't sure what it is, and senses that public recognition can only contaminate her efforts.

Curran's film, about Robyn Davidson (Mia Wasikowska) crossing the deserts of West Australia on foot, accompanied by four camels and a dog, telegraphs its every occurrence far in advance and is near painful in its linearity. Claudel's film, advertised as a suspenseful thriller in the style of Michael Haneke's Caché, is a meandering tale of white male privilege that sabotages any possible suspense in its prologue by giving away part of its indefensibly, unpredictably bad ending.

Curran's direction and technical contributions make the most of the natural beauty on display, but that, in a way, is part of the problem. Just like "Into The Wild" and other stories of amazing journeys of endurance, "Tracks" has only one dimension. You can admire these people or you can question their motives, but it's extremely difficult for the movie not to be enthralled by the individuals.

The film may be brave in spotlighting such an inherently unlikable character, but it fails to provide a truly compelling reason as to why we should be interested in Davidson's foolhardy quest; woozily shot flashbacks reveal a family bereavement, but the film treats her journey like a selfish, particularly bloody-minded "gap year"—or, for the Americans reading this, a post-high school sabbatical.

The best decision made by director Curran, who manages proceedings with all the unobtrusively classical elegance he did his underrated adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil," was to get Mandy Walker behind the camera... The delicate modulations of her clay-and-fire palette here are particularly extraordinary, as the sun bakes the earth and Wasikowska's freckled complexion alike to a similarly mottled terracotta hue.