Samson and Delilah

My review of Warwick Thornton’s impressive, award winning, debut feature film: Samson and Delilah.

Teenager Samson lives in a small Indigenous Australians community in the hot, dry and desolate desert. Like many teenagers he is bored with life, he lives in a featureless house, sleeps in his clothes and awakes every morning to the repetitive sound of his brother’s reggae band which uses the porch as a stage and seems to play the same tune all day. He survives the tedium by sniffing on his can of petrol before facing the day. He starts off by grabbing the electric guitar and playing some rock n roll but the band members chase him away. However he has nowhere to go to and nothing to do. Instead, he helps him self to an old wheel chair and sits outside the town’s only shop staring aimlessly…… until he sees a teenage girl, Delilah. With an apparent lack of conversational skills, he starts the courtship by writing "S4D" on the shop wall, before progressing to attracting her attention by throwing rocks at her.


Delilah spends her days caring for and painting with her elderly nana who encourages the courtship. When her mother fails to awaken one morning the town’s women take to beating Delilah for neglecting her, Samson turns to his solvent abuse before smashing up the band’s equipment and vandalising the town houses. They steal the town car and head towards the city, however with Samson more prone to sniffing the petrol, than to putting it in the tank; they run out of fuel and walk the rest. They share life under a bridge with an alcoholic, who becomes frustrated with their lack of speech and eventually insists that they speak at least one word before he shares his food with them.

Delilah sees her nana’s work on display in a shopping mall for Aus$22,000 and realises just how much that they had been exploited. She takes up painting again but no one is interested in buying works of art from a down and out. The film illustrates just how marginalised the indigenous population have become in their own country.

With Samson being oblivious to anything apart from the petrol bottle under his nose, a gang of youths kidnap Delilah and presumably rape her, she returns under the bridge beaten and scarred but realises that she has not been missed. Feeling at an all time low, she turns to sniffing petrol. Whilst walking aimlessly is run down by a car but again Sampson is oblivious and keeps on walking. When he realises she is missing, he retraces his steps and finds the signs of the car cash. Presuming that she has died he increases his solvent abuse. The talkative, singing, alcoholic is taken in by the church and Samson is left alone and hopeless.

This is where the film could and perhaps should end, reflecting the hopelessness of the situation that some people find themselves in. However Thornton must consider the grim reality to be too uncomfortable for the audience and instead of leaving it there decide to have a happy ending.

Delilah appears in front of him in an almost angelic vision before the film reveals that she hadn’t been killed in the accident, she was now clean and well dressed, her cuts and scars had gone and she was accompanied with Samson’s brother who took them back to the township. They were given a car and food and made their way further into the countryside where apparently Delilah had (inherited?) a house with running water. She cared for Samson as she had cared for her Nana, he became clean and she took up the traditional painting that her Nana had taught her… and presumably they both lived happily ever after, in their conversation free isolation.

The film has fine performances from both Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson as the two lead actors and is powerful in telling, probably for the first time on the big screen, the tragedy of an exploited and largely ignored rural Aboriginal community. However Thornton's happy ending does, in my opinion, detract from the harsh reality of their life.