We're in Sydney, some time in the 1970s. It's beset with bizarre rainstorms, and during one of them a group of Aboriginal men are socialising at a pub when things turn violent and one of them is killed. After the other four are then accused of murder, local white solicitor David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) is recruited to defend them. Despite specialising in corporate taxation and not criminal defense he accepts the case, only to then find his personal and professional lives spiralling out of control, especially when he begins experiencing strange and recurring premonitions about one of the suspects (a young David Gulpilil) and the weather.
After his mainstream breakthrough with 1975's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir directed this assured and most unusual and intriguing mystery drama which obviously also touches very prominently on Australian race relations, as well as dreams, mythology and psychology. It's certainly Weir at his most experimental, but like with his very best films he takes his time to ensure the story is told as coherently, insightfully and objectively as possible. The screenplay he co-wrote with Tony Morphett and Petro Popescu is tightly plotted and balanced, the cast all invest their characters with presence and conviction, and Weir's regular cinematographer Russell Boyd shows signs of the Oscar-winning photography he would achieve with Weir's 2003 movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Its editing and score are maybe too conventional for a narrative as experimental as this film's, but despite those drawbacks The Last Wave is quite worthy of arguably Australia's greatest-ever filmmaker. 8/10.
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