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The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Australia · 2022
1h 49m
Director Leah Purcell
Starring Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid, Jessica De Gouw
Genre Drama, Thriller, Western

In the Australian Outback of 1893, the terrain is rough, the people hard-nosed, and the law somewhat secondary. Molly Johnson, heavily pregnant and alone with her children on a farm far from town, struggles to raise her children and run the family farm while her husband is away.

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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.

58

IndieWire by Kate Erbland

Purcell, as star, stays resolute to the last, but as filmmaker, her sharp ideas are dulled into something that barely leaves a mark.

40

CineVue by Matthew Anderson

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

Screen Daily by Sarah Ward

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.

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