Synopsis
Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aboriginal boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.
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Cast
- Jenny AgutterGirl
- Luc RoegWhite Boy
- David GulpililBlack Boy
- John MeillonMan
- Robert McDarraMan
- Peter CarverNo Hoper
- John IllingsworthYoung Man
- Hilary BambergerWoman
- Barry DonnellyAustralian Scientist
- Noeline BrownGerman Scientist
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
Walkabout is a superb work of storytelling and its material is effortlessly fascinating. - 100
The A.V. Club
Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world. - 100
Empire
It's a deep film, but also elusive, accepting that some mysteries can never be solved. - 91
Entertainment Weekly
Nicolas Roeg’s art-house adventure is lyrical and intoxicating. - 80
Village Voice
A richly picturesque, multi-leveled film. [20 May 1971, p.66] - 75
ReelViews
For the most part, Walkabout is an involving, occasionally hypnotic, motion picture. Some of the photography, including images of the outback and its denizens, is spectacular. - 75
San Francisco Chronicle
A strange, vivid tale of two British schoolchildren stranded in the deserts of the outback. - 75
Slant Magazine
Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.
