ANDAMOOKA begins in a dirty bathroom, a plain faced woman crying into the mirror. The raw lighting and sparse design smacks of Australian classics like Lantana or Somersault. You would be forgiven for thinking something dark and twisted was about to happen, but you would be waiting for an anvil that never lands.
The movie is essentially a coming-of-age story, where the age is 30 and the protagonist is reeling from a failed engagement and the hollow 9-5 grind of Sydney life. To heal her wounds, she drives to the heart of the country to look for something; although we never quite learn what that something is. Not much happens on the journey. She has a romance with a snake handling punk in Alice Springs, watches some T.O’s kill a kangaroo, contemplates climbing Uluru and decides not to, picks up a friendly hitch hiker and doesn’t get murdered, visits an old friend and is disappointed. She ends up back where she started, looking at the ocean.
The lack of drama in the film is probably a product of the way it was made – low budget, on the fly, loose script, real people rather than actors for the secondary cast. However the result is less Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (also made using real people and with a limited script, but which had a deep political message and a wider social narrative to piggyback on) and more like a classic French new wave film (the making of which was recently captured so artfully by Richard Linklater in Nouvel Vague, to emphasise how it was effectively an extension of one mans’ ego).
Instead of drama, ANDAMOOKA has limited dialogue and lots of long, beautiful shots of the landscape that invite us deep inside the mind of the protagonist Alex. And here in lies the beauty of the film. The film is shockingly honest, and some of the best shots are of her cutting her pubes in a public bathroom and pulling faces in the mirror. While we don’t learn much about the characters life, or the relationship breakdown which has driven her into the heart of the country, the film still feels private and raw; non-verbal in a way that reaches for new heights of honesty between actor and audience. It’s a bold first film from Quinn which speaks to the zeitgeist of millennial malaise and our quest for meaning.
In an age of big budget films and over wrought narratives, perhaps the message of the film is that not much actually happens in a person’s life. We find meaning by paying attention to the little moments along the way, rather than planning for milestones which might never come. It’s an inspiring debut, filled with images of the country which will animate your dreams for weeks afterwards.
After previewing at film festivals around the world in 2025, ANDAMOOKA is now available on Paramount +.
