Walkabout

When I last reviewed Walkabout (1971), I wrote: “Prior to Walkabout, Nicolas Roeg had co-directed (with Donald Cammell) only one film, the astonishing Performance, so a good deal was riding on the cinematographer-turned-filmmaker’s second outing. Could Roeg pull off a solo film? Indeed he could—and in so doing he established himself as a filmmaker with a unique, if not always completely penetrable, vision. … Nowhere is this more evident than in Walkabout, where we’re given a story predicated on a father taking his children (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) on a wilderness picnic—where he proceeds to try to shoot them, before setting his car on fire and committing suicide. There are intimations from the onset that things are not as they should be, but that’s all—and the set-up seems mostly designed to get us to the basic story of the children wandering through the Australian outback in the most disturbing manner possible.” Full review here: http://www.mountainx.com/movies/review/walkabout.php