The Last Wave

The Last Wave (1977)
Director: Peter Weir
Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, David Gulpilil
Memorable Line: "Dream is a shadow ... of something real."

* Underrated and Overlooked *
The Last Wave is mysterious and haunting movie with a rich ethereal atmoshere. At points, it's almost hypnotic.

David Burton (Chamberlain), a lawyer in Sydney, Australia, is struck by striking apocalyptic visions and they shake his world to its core. As a part of his job, he is charged with defending a group of Aborigines and comes to find that one of the defendants is the man in his dreams. The deeper he delves into his dreams, the more disturbing and frightening the dreams become. The film escalates with tension as the visions of Burton's dreams start to invade the reality of his world.

A reoccurring theme in Weir's early films was the class of cultures. This movie features the mixing of the primitive Aboriginal culture with the modern WASP culture. The intersection of these two world not only come together in the physical world of the legal case and supernaturally in Burton's dreams.

A highlight of the movie is wonderful photography of Russell Boyd. Each shot is composed with beauty and style.

It's not in your face horror, but it is a haunting and subtle vision of a supernatural future. When I first saw it as a teen, it captured me right from the first shot.