70
Despite struggling with a thematic focus, the film presents a woman who is well worth getting to know.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
An interrogation of Australia's history of racial violence that also takes on gender, identity and domestic abuse against a backdrop right out of an archetypal high country Western, the engrossing thriller is admirably ambitious but choppy, at times eluding the director's grasp.
90
An exceptionally compelling Outback Western.
58
Purcell, as star, stays resolute to the last, but as filmmaker, her sharp ideas are dulled into something that barely leaves a mark.
40
The metaphors of colonial history, the subjugation of women and Aboriginal peoples, vicious social ills and a nation’s hidden guilty past are all alluded to. But their treatment in The Legend of Molly Johnson are not developed to the extent needed to leave the lasting gut punch, and change of consciousness, this admirable project could have achieved.
80
The atmospheric revenge-thriller marks the feature filmmaking debut of actor/writer/director Leah Purcell, who plays the titular matriarch with steely resolve, rousingly adapts her own play and book, and delivers an impassioned film with an unflinching Indigenous and feminist perspective.