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The Last Wave

The Last Wave is a 1977 Australian mystery film directed by Peter Weir, in which a Sydney lawyer defending Aboriginal men accused of a ritual killing is drawn into prophetic dreams and an apocalyptic vision of a giant wave destroying the city. It was Weir's first film to be released in America and is regarded as a major work of the 1970s Australian film revival.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Peter Weir, 1977, Australia; 106 minutes, color, English¹
Premise	Sydney tax lawyer David Burton defends five Aboriginal men charged with killing another Aboriginal man, and recognizes one of the accused from a recurring dream³
Lead cast	Richard Chamberlain (David Burton), Olivia Hamnett (Annie Burton), David Gulpilil (Chris Lee), Nandjiwarra Amagula (Charlie)¹
Screenplay	Peter Weir, Tony Morphett, and Petru Popescu; cinematography by Russell Boyd; music by Charles Wain¹
US release	Weir's first film released in America; US theatrical release October 6, 1978¹^•⁴
Critical standing	78% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 18 reviews; a fixture of accounts of the Australian New Wave⁴^•²
Home video	Criterion Collection spine #142, director-approved special edition¹

Spoilers

Plot

David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) is a successful Sydney tax lawyer who takes on the defense of five Aboriginal men charged with killing another Aboriginal man. As the city is deluged with rain, Burton recognizes that he has seen one of the accused, Chris Lee (David Gulpilil), before, in a recurring dream. Lee, together with Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula), an elderly Aboriginal man, will not take part in the court proceedings, since the homicide involves objects that are sacred and secret to a nearby tribe. As the weather worsens, Burton has a premonition of disaster in which he is to play a key role.³

The defendants deny any tribal association, and none will speak about what happened even in their own defense; the medical examiner cannot determine how the victim died.¹^•⁴ From the outside, the killing appears to be a bar fight gone wrong, and the group offers little more explanation than "Billy died, that's all." Burton comes to realize what the audience has known from the outset: the death was an execution carried out under Aboriginal law in retribution for the theft of sacred objects, and it manifests as an otherworldly force.⁵

The film's imagery is built around water. Anomalous weather runs through the story, from the opening freak hailstorm at a desert school to torrential rain, black rain, and showers of frogs, which Burton comes to read as signs of an approaching apocalypse.⁶^•⁷ In the final episode, Chris Lee takes Burton to the sacred tribal grounds, where Burton sees his own likeness in a stone face and interprets the wall paintings to mean that the present cycle of time will end with a giant wave.⁸ The ending is deliberately ambiguous: Burton follows Chris through a cavern of talismanic paintings and confronts a swelling sea, while the film refuses to resolve either the political or the spiritual questions it raises.⁹

Genre and themes

Weir's film is not exactly a horror film, but like his previous feature Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) it explores the irrational within the rational world, maintaining an atmosphere of mystery as inexplicable events occur that modern science cannot explain.¹⁰ The film critic Adrian Martin, applying Tzvetan Todorov's distinction between the uncanny and the marvelous, describes the film as dealing almost exclusively with the marvelous, in the form of Aboriginal mythology of the Dreamtime (aboriginal belief system of ancestral creation-era stories and spirits); rational explanations of the strange weather, such as planetary position or air pollution, carry little weight in the story.¹¹

The film is widely identified as a key work of the Australian Gothic. It concentrates the mode's consistent threads: the disorientation and disempowerment of the protagonist, the domestic home as the epicenter of disruption, the foregrounding of repressed national and familial pasts, and the subversion of the ordinary through revelation. Unlike earlier films that consigned Aboriginality to the past, The Last Wave reverses that move, as the reassertion of antecedent culture heralds the doom of non-Aboriginal Australia.¹² Its urban setting is central: the film is explicitly concerned with the presence of Aboriginal people within Sydney, and it engages with the persistent invisibility of historical and present-day Aboriginality in modern urban Australia, including the historically Aboriginal neighborhood of Redfern.¹³^•¹⁴

A central tension in the film's reception is its vantage point. The film approaches Aboriginal spirituality from outside Indigenous experience, making it the driving force behind a white protagonist's crisis, a perspective that subsequent scholars have judged both groundbreaking and exploitative.² A chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film argues that the film resists the othering lens of monstrousness often associated with horror depictions of Aboriginal people: its horror stems from the white protagonist's need for Aboriginal people to fill a void in himself, and it depicts dreaming as something that can potentially interweave white and Black experiences across painful histories.¹⁵ Critics have also noted that the Aboriginal characters are all impoverished and framed as a "social problem" within urban Australian society, despite the qualities of integrity and spirituality the film gives them.¹⁶

Production

Weir followed the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock with the film, working from a screenplay developed with Tony Morphett and Petru Popescu for producers Hal and James McElroy.¹ He later traced the film's origin to a 1976 experience at the Roman archaeological site of Dougga in Tunisia, where, on the point of leaving, he turned back and found a small Roman effigy hidden in a recess in the ground; he called that vision the starting point of The Last Wave, one that haunted his later films as well.¹⁷ In interviews he also connected the film's interest in hidden meanings to the 1970s reception of the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda's work on shamanism and to the Aboriginal tradition built on the territory of the dream.¹⁷

Indigenous consultation. The film is notable as an early example of a production employing First Nations consultants. The principal Aboriginal advisor was Nandjiwarra Amagula, a Groote Eylandt elder who also acted in the film as Charlie. Amagula rejected Weir's initial intention to use real Aboriginal artifacts and symbols, on the grounds that broadcasting sacred items would be culturally inappropriate; the production instead developed an array of fictional cultural symbols with his approval.⁵ Weir repeatedly insisted that he was no expert on Aboriginal tribal culture, calling himself simply "a storyteller," but he made a point of learning as much as he could from Amagula, who was on set through most of the shoot, and he incorporated observations and comments that Amagula and others made during production.¹⁰ Weir credited David Gulpilil as crucial to the film's development: talking with him, Weir said, he realized the absurdity of the history books and that Aboriginal culture was very much alive, if underground.⁵

For Gulpilil, the Yolngu actor who had debuted in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), the film was his fourth, and it became a marker in a career devoted to communicating Aboriginal identity, culture, and history to Australian audiences.¹⁸^•¹⁹

Release and reception

A few months ahead of its 13 December 1977 Australian debut, the film appeared at festivals held in Paris and Tehran, taking home prizes at each. Australian critics reacted favorably, and the film garnered further critical praise internationally, though some critics found the ending too inconclusive for the mood the film had built.⁶ It was received as a major work of the Australian revival and confirmed Weir as a filmmaker of international stature, circulating widely abroad and contributing to the global visibility of the new Australian cinema.² Richard Chamberlain's performance earned him a nomination for best actor at the Australian Film Institute awards that year.⁵

Reviewers at the time and in later years have repeatedly praised Russell Boyd's camerawork and the film's ongoing mood of dread as its greatest achievements, whereas newer scholars have questioned how it builds its "secret" mythology and deploys Indigenous spirituality as scenery for a white protagonist's existential crisis.² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 78% Tomatometer from 18 reviews, with an identical 78% audience score from more than 2,500 ratings.⁴ The film is now studied alongside Picnic at Hanging Rock as the twin pillars of Weir's Australian period, and it stands as an early reference point for eco-horror and for cinema that frames environmental and colonial catastrophe as metaphysical inevitability.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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