An ancient doomsday prophecy haunts Australian lawyer Richard Chamberlain while freakish weather plagues Sydney in Peter Weir’s newly remastered murder mystery-turned-apocalyptic chiller from 1977.
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The Last Wave has an unsettling surreal energy that seems to exist entirely in that moment, where something as ordinary as the weather becomes an instrument of terror and suspense.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2020
The Last Wave 1977
This film is screening in select cinemas and venues across the country. See here for details.
As relevant today as it was more than 40 years ago on first release, Peter Weir’s supernatural Australian classic returns newly remastered from the original 35mm interpositive.
“Opening with the uncanny sight of a sunny, cloudless sky erupting into a torrential ice storm, Australian New Waver Peter Weir’s hallucinatory follow up to Picnic at Hanging Rock is part murder mystery, part apocalyptic chiller. When he agrees to defend a group of Aboriginal men charged with homicide, a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) is plunged into a shadow world of secret societies, shamanic rituals, and an ancient doomsday prophecy. And then the black rain starts to fall… Surely one of the wettest films ever made – nearly every frame is drenched in ominous, aqueous imagery – The Last Wave sustains an air of dream-state dread as it builds towards its brain-bending climax.” — Film at Lincoln Center
“Strange, foreboding and brilliantly different from any film ever made in Australia, The Last Wave is time past, future and present, a mingling of Aboriginal Dreamtime, Revelations, doomsday predictions and the Deluge.” — Sydney Morning Herald, 1977
About the Filmmaker
Peter Weir is one of Australia’s most important directors. A leading figure in the Australian New Wave, the success of his early films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and A Year of Living Dangerously (1983) led to Oscar-nominated works like Witness (1985) and The Truman Show (1998). Other key films include Dead Poets Society (1989), Fearless (1993) and Master & Commander (2003).