Film

The Last Wave

Name: The Last Wave
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Horror
Released: 1977
Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, David Gulpilil, Frederick Parslow, Vivean Gray

Western

Peter Weir's 1977 masterpiece haunts like few films do. A Sydney lawyer defends Aboriginal clients accused of ritual murder, only to find himself pulled into their world of ancestral knowledge and apocalyptic dread. Hypnotic, genuinely unsettling, shot through with the sense that reality has thinner walls than we'd like to believe. For anyone who loves slow-burn dread and films that rewire your brain.

TMDb rating

3.3

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like slow, uncanny films where dread builds through images and silence rather than explanation, and you don't mind being left unsure what you just saw.

Skip it if you want a tightly plotted courtroom thriller, because the legal story recedes into long, unhurried stretches of drifting images and unease.

What it asks of you: Its 106 minutes move slowly, lingering on faces, weather and sound, with meaning arriving sideways rather than through dialogue.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Mulholland Drive2001

Another film about a man losing his grip on reality while investigating something that refuses to stay solved. Weir's mystery-box DNA runs through it—fractured, circular, impossible to shake.

But Nearly three hours of deliberately confusing storytelling that asks a lot of patience. Not a film that lets you relax into answers.

Don't Look Now1973

Venice, grief, premonition, and a man who sees too much. Roeg's masterpiece matches Weir's gift for making ordinary moments feel saturated with inexplicable dread.

But Requires you to sit with ambiguity and unease. The pacing is deliberate—some find it slow to the point of frustration.

Picnic at Hanging Rock1975

Also Weir, also Australian, also utterly enigmatic. Girls vanish at a sacred site and the film refuses to explain why. Pure atmospheric mystery.

But Deliberately anti-narrative. If you need plot resolution, this will infuriate you rather than seduce you.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Last Wave

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Meshes of the Afternoon1943

Both use ritual structure and cyclical time to suggest that consciousness is porous and that the past is never past—it's operating underneath what we see.

Maya Deren's 16-minute avant-garde loop—a woman's day spirals into ritual and premonition. Nothing like The Last Wave in scale, but identical in DNA: the uncanny erupting through domestic repetition, ancestral knowledge coded in mirrors and keys.

But Experimental film without dialogue or conventional narrative. Experimental doesn't mean difficult, but it does mean it requires you to feel rather than follow.

Stalker1979

Tarkovsky's meditation on desire and knowledge shares The Last Wave's conviction that some truths unmake you. Hypnotic long takes, spiritual weight, inexplicable dread.

But Slow, philosophical, shot in muted colours. It's cinema as endurance test for some viewers—no action, minimal dialogue, maximum existential vertigo.

The Wailing2016

A Korean fever-dream about faith, certainty, and what happens when a man investigates something that corrodes his understanding of good and evil. Weir's DNA but amplified and more baroque.

But Deliberately withholding. The plot tangles deliberately; some see that as brilliant, others as frustrating refusal to play fair.

Under the Skin2014

Glazer's film about an otherworldly presence operating in plain sight—glacial pacing, minimal dialogue, and a creeping sense of wrongness. Weir would recognise the sensibility.

But Supremely patient and opaque. Long stretches of near-wordless cinema. If you need clarity and forward momentum, you'll find it tedious.

The Lair of the White Worm1988

Ken Russell's fever-dream about evil erupting into the English countryside through pagan ritual and sexual transgression. Matches The Last Wave's sense of ancient knowledge bleeding into the present.

But Deliberately unhinged and pulpy—campy in ways The Last Wave is not. Some see it as brilliant provocation; others as self-indulgent nonsense.

Possession1981

Andrzej Żuławski's Berlin descent into marital horror and occult nightmare. Like The Last Wave, it uses supernatural dread to excavate psychological truth beneath polite surfaces.

But Violently weird, operatic, occasionally incoherent. It's abrasive in ways that alienate as often as they illuminate.

The Long Good Friday1980

A crime boss's hold on reality fractures across twenty-four hours in London. It shares The Last Wave's structure: confident man pulled into a world he cannot control or understand.

But British crime thriller, so very much of its time. If you hate eighties production design or Cockney accents, it won't seduce you.

Walkabout1971

Both films centre on Australianness as a collision between Western rationality and Indigenous ontologies—knowledge systems that see reality as fundamentally different from what Europeans assume.

Roeg's Australian outback epic: a girl and boy abandoned in the desert meet an Aboriginal boy and learn they are the foreigners in their own landscape. Shares Weir's sense of Western certainty dissolving before ancient knowledge.

But Sparse dialogue, long stretches of landscape, a slow burn that many find glacial. The sexuality is subtle but will read oddly to modern eyes.

A Dark Song2016

Both treat the supernatural as ontologically real, not as psychological delusion—and both ask what it costs a rational person to accept that the world is far stranger than reason allows.

An Irish occult drama about a widow and a disgraced priest attempting a dangerous ritual to contact the dead. Far quieter and more intimate than The Last Wave, but built on the same faith: that the invisible is real, that ritual works, that you can be unmade by seeking truth.

But Very slow, very sad, very focused on two people in a house. If you need action or spectacle, it will feel like watching paint dry. Genuinely bleak.