Tracks

Tracks (2013) is John Curran's Australian adventure drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It retells something that actually happened: in the late 1970s a young woman named Robyn Davidson walked alone across nearly two thousand miles of Australian desert.

Robyn (Mia Wasikowska) leaves people behind and heads for the coast with her dog and four camels she has trained herself. National Geographic funds the trek, and the deal brings a photographer, Rick Smolan, out to meet her along the way at intervals; Adam Driver plays him. Their push-and-pull, half irritation and half intimacy, is the only real human thread running through the heat, and the film refuses to flatten it into romance.

Curran films solitude honestly, never pausing to explain on the soundtrack what she is running from. Cinematographer Mandy Walker hands almost the whole frame to the desert, leaving the viewer to fill in Robyn's interior journey. This one is for people drawn to themes of isolation and the open road rather than to a survival spectacle. Stream Tracks (2013) online on iFILM.