The Last Wave

  Hasn't the weather been strange... could it be a warning? Asks the oddly worded poster for The Last Wave, Peter Weir's 1977 follow-up to Picnic at Hanging Rock.
 Like his previous film, it's another languid, atmospheric take on a mystery that's never really resolved. Or rather, it is, kind of, but it's a vague resolution that just raises more questions. It's complicated.

 Things kick off in a tiny school somewhere in the Australian outback on a cloudless, sweltering summer day. Suddenly thunder rings out, then driving rain; the children get herded back into the classroom shortly before huge hailstones start coming down, breaking windows, hurting one of the kids and scaring them all half to death. A great scene.

 A short time later, rainstorms are hammering Sidney, but at least these ones have the grace to come from cloudy skies. There we meet our protagonist, David (Richard Chamberlain), a corporate tax lawyer.
 Because he's offered some advice to humanitarian organizations in the past, he's asked to help mount a legal defense for a group of aboriginals who stand accused of killing another man. Feeling unqualified, but intrigued, David takes the case.

 As the days go on, David is assaulted by vivid dreams - including a creepy one where a whole street is drowned, and one where he sees one of the aboriginals in his house; a neat trick, since he hasn't met them face-to-face yet. When he later recognizes him from his dream, he starts getting convinced that something supernatural is going on. He tries to get explanations from the aborigine in his dream (David Gulpilil) and their shaman (Nandjiwarra Amagula), and gets... well, something about being a 'Mulkurul', a made-up term that the Wikipedia entry for the movie tells me has to do with 'a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bearing sacred objects with them'.
 The weird stuff is intriguing, but not a lot gets explained - just a few tantalizing connections, like David being from South America, and then discovering what look like Mayan drawings and artifacts in the sewers beneath the city. 

 It's an appropriately dream-like movie, glacially paced and drenched through (ha!) with water imagery. Almost every scene features running water in some capacity, and it turns out to be an eerily effective motif. The film oozes atmosphere thanks to some great cinematography (courtesy of Russell Boyd) and a cool electronic-and-didgeridoo-powered soundtrack (from Groove Myers).

 Unfortunately, that is most of what it's running on - Atmosphere. Also: Fortean phenomena, a vague apocalyptic sense of menace, a few woolly mysteries, and some nice visuals. The narrative is too much on the thin side, and to be honest I found it a bit of a chore to get through.
 Weir has stated that he wanted to explore what happens when a modern pragmatic person gets a premonition, and David's journey from rationalist to believer is engaging (aided by a very likeable performance from Chamberlain and Olivia Hamnett, who plays his wife). Though I did laugh when he starts talking about sorcery as a murder weapon at a courtroom, silly wig and all.
 Meanwhile the native actors do a good job of playing a closed-knit group trying to gauge this intruder's attempts to poke at a body of knowledge no one ever shows any interest in.

 I don't know; This is the kind of movie that I suspect I would have liked if I had watched it on a day when I'm more in tune with its wavelength - it's certainly well-made and weird enough to merit a revisit someday.