Rather like Athol Fugard's early play, Boesman and Lena, though less obviously indebted to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Warwick Thornton's accomplished film is about the uneasy but ultimately loving relationship between two outcasts, rejected by their own people but unable to find a place in the dominant culture. They're Aboriginal teenagers living in an impoverished village in the Outback. Samson is an inert substance-sniffer at odds with his siblings, Delilah a pretty girl devoted to her elderly grandmother, a tribal painter, and wrongly blamed for her death. After both are beaten up, Samson steals a community-owned van and heads for the nearest township where for a while they sleep under a roadway, cold-shouldered by the local whites and fed by a kindly but demented Aboriginal hobo.

There's no formal exposition and virtually no dialogue: Samson's speaks only once, stammering his own name, his mind confused by inhaling petrol fumes. But there's an abundance of social and behavioural detail that we're left to interpret, and there's a tentatively affirmative ending. The performances Thornton has elicited from Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson carry total conviction.