The genesis of Peter Weir’s dark, supra-natural thriller is as fascinating as the final product. As Weir told David Stratton for his history of Australia’s 1970s ‘film renaissance’, The Last New Wave (whose title subtly lionises this film), he’d been travelling to Tunisia in 1971 to see what, after Pompeii, is the best preserved Roman city site. During a walk on the way,

"I was suddenly seized with this strange feeling I was going to find something, I even saw what I was going to see. And there it was, on the ground, a carving of a child’s head… Why did I see the head in my mind before I saw it in actuality? And… what if a very rational person - a lawyer, say – had had the same experience? How would he cope with it?"

"So what? What’s unusual about it? Doesn’t it happen to everybody?" was Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil’s response (ref: In Black & White And Colour, Peter Malone, 102) and from this contrast, the screenplay was born.

The Last Wave lives up to its backstory, with an extraordinary richness – in atmosphere, implication and nuance. It’s also a comprehensive illustration of how mise-en-scene (the general filmic environment in a scene) can be used to varying ends.

Characters’ traits are subtly reinforced, such as when we hear the phrase "the black prince" poke through the chatter of a radio calling the races in the pub where the young Aboriginal men congregate; during dinner table dialogue in white suburbia we hear an opinion that dreams ‘live in the shadows’ as Charlie, the Aboriginal elder, retreats there into the darkness of a corner.

The film’s explicit use of Aboriginal iconography and symbols is contrasted, by carefully held shots, with the white world’s unnoticed counterparts – a lion on a Leyland bus, crossed flags on a Chevy’s hubcap, a fake nose mask at a suburban fancy dress party. The resulting comparison gradually evokes an unexpected commonality between the races to emphasise a shared humanity. Hands also figure strongly in visual contrasts between white and black, husband and wife, etc. (For the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales hand symbols are analogous to a ‘green light’, indicating the way forward is clear and safe.)

The Last Wave is a deeply spiritual work, with its expository sections strongly reflected and reinforced by its more subtle associations, actions and hierarchies.   Thus the constant presence of excessive water is not so much a threat, as a way of putting human agency in perspective: humankind is not the greatest power.

The Last Wave is also beautifully structured, with key scenes repeated to reveal their latent importance: water running down the house’s steps, dad coming home to daughter framed in a dark doorway, the commuter carrying an indoor plant through the downpour. The irony of the latter sets the tone of the film’s main urban section, which opens with a drenched pedestrian leaning down to drink from a water fountain in a downpour! This is more than funny, it puts us on notice to look again at what we’re seeing. You suspect Weir feels if we can do this in a film, then perhaps we can do it in a cultural frame as well.

The young Aboriginal man Gulpilil is nothing short of beautiful – he is first seen filling the screen in a ‘glamour’ shot redolent of classic movie matinee idols. But when the Aborigines’ sacred place is finally revealed it’s literally deep in the shit – underneath a sewerage plant. There’s a great piece of cinematography here when Chamberlain leaves the sewer, and the film reverses his descent down a metal staircase using an angle making this, his return to the white world above, appear a descent – a clear indication of where Weir’s sentiments lie. There’s even a Kubrickian moment, when Chamberlain enters the sewerage plant and sees the entry to the burial ‘crypt’, backlit like the obelisk in 2001.

Dark the first time, The Last Wave is a masterwork of cinema that grows in depth and resonance with each successive viewing.

- Roger Westcombe