Critics reviews

Because it’s Roeg behind the camera, the imagery takes on the feverish intensity of a vision quest. A box office flop, Walkabout courted controversy for its depictions of animal murder and the fact that Agutter was only 17 when she filmed her nude scenes; it has since been reevaluated as a signal film for the Australian New Wave and one of the great art house freak-outs of the 1970s.

Of course, it should come as no real surprise that Roeg, who first distinguished himself as a cinematographer, would be able to convey a story in visual terms, but it was that audience's response to the subtleties of the characters' emotions that most underlined his achievement... Don't Look Now should be proof enough that, more than any other British filmmaker of his generation, Roeg has the ability to create pure cinema. But the finest example of his gift remains Walkabout (1971).

While Walkabout may have been his proper directorial debut (he shared billing on the grimacing, sociopathic Performance with Donald Cammell), it's far more significantly his final cinematographic statement... Descriptions of plot are likely to suggest a preachiness that isn't at all present in the film's rhythmic, heady form, but this, too, communicates how deftly Roeg straddles the fascinatingly fecund border between impotent, imagaic mood piece and bland cautionary tale.

Roeg's restless camera makes the Australian wilderness lyrically granular: Changes in angle give you the desert floor from the vantage point of lizard and scorpion, an overhead shot ponders the virginal heroine as a serpent slithers over her sleeping figure, a one-tree oasis is glimpsed with upside-down lenses... Peeling colonialism, awakening and the Dawn of Man are fiercely indicated in Roeg's wondrously sustained fever.

As an intercultural "walk into nature", Walkabout remains timeless, despite a sometimes dated view of "Third World" peoples. The innovative visual narrative reveals new meanings on each viewing. I will focus on two aspects of this narrative through which Roeg troubles Western preconceptions about what is normative...

Roeg's shots of steely, spiritless cityscapes bring to mind Michelangelo Antonioni and Jacques Tati's jabs at industrial topographies and his elusive editing draws gripping comparisons between nature's food chain and the savagery of urban planning.

A haunting film, set in a fading but spectacular world – ancient Australia. Sparse in dialogue, immersed in an ancient landscape with a reptile, insect population and chocker-block full of innocence and sexual tension... It's still striking today but must have been remarkably bold in the climate of its time – contrasting Aboriginal and Western perspectives on an equal plane. Australian writers and filmmakers have rarely embraced how full of life the outback is.

Passing as a children's nature film, Walkabout is, in fact, about the casual brutality of the bourgeoisie and the politesse through which it achieves domination... Visually fabulous, Walkabout seems almost as desultory in its structure as the children's journey. Eventually, the political paradoxes Roeg and screenwriter Edward Bond have planted en route come together like a kick in the head.

The film is composed like an ecological tone poem, short on dialogue but rich in intuitive insights about the thin veneer between civilization and primitivism. The underlying themes of mystical survival and pubescent eruptions amidst casual, natural brutality are ingeniously demonstrated and do not have to be stated.

This 1971 film was Nicolas Roeg's first solo effort, and it's still one of his most satisfying achievements. The themes are large and abstract enough to support Roeg's large, abstract style; there's no sense of disappointment, as there often is in Roeg's films, when the stylistic baroque collapses into stylistic banality.