The Last Wave 1977

David Burton Richard Chamberlain is drawn into a disturbing case when a deadly drowning is ruled a homicide after a pub brawl among Aboriginal people in Sydney. The four men accused of the crime become clients of the Australian Legal Aid system, and Burton—whose real-world practice centers on corporate taxation rather than criminal defense—accepts the challenge more from curiosity than passion. As he agrees to defend them, his personal life and his sense of professional boundaries begin to fray, setting off a chain of events that pulls him toward something far more enigmatic than a straightforward courtroom drama.

Burton’s days blur into unsettling visions: running water, submerged bodies, and the creeping sense that the case is tapping into a larger order. A remarkable moment comes when a man from the prison, Chris Lee David Gulpilil, visits Burton at home, and the two men feel an uncanny pull that Burton cannot explain. As the inquiry unfolds and the four accused men wait under the shadow of colonial history, Burton’s dreams grow more vivid and more insistent. He begins to suspect that the murder might stem from an Aboriginal ritual punishment, perhaps enforced by a curse enacted with a bone. Yet Lee refuses to reveal tribal specifics or admit guilt in plain terms, instead urging Burton to trust the hidden meanings of his dreams. Through conversations with Lee and insights into Dreamtime—the parallel world of ancestral spirits—Burton learns that Mulkurul, a term Lee uses to describe a lineage connected to distant, sacred origins, might be guiding him toward a revelation bigger than any verdict.

Dr. Whitburn Vivean Gray becomes a crucial ally as Burton dives deeper into Aboriginal practices and cosmology. A complex tapestry of beliefs unfolds: shamanic ceremonies, sacred sites hidden beneath urban facades, and an older logic that seems to govern weather, fate, and the fates of those touched by the case. The more he discovers, the more Burton feels the city itself trembling under a storm whose purpose he begins to glimpse. When the rain intensifies and the floodwaters threaten to swallow the town, Burton convinces his wife that they must safeguard their children and depart from the city—an act that underscores the personal cost of his pursuit and foreshadows the wider catastrophe he senses on the horizon.

The plot accelerates as Chris Lee escapes prison and guides Burton through a network of subterranean tunnels that lead to a sacred Aboriginal ritual site. In a hidden chamber nearby, Burton encounters a ceiling painting that depicts the arrival of European explorers from a distant land and a calendrical prophecy of an oceanic disaster. Among relics scattered in the chamber—an ancient corpse clad in decayed Western garments and a stone mask—Burton recognizes a chilling likeness: the face etched into the relics appears to be his own. The discovery intensifies the stakes, and a brutal confrontation with the tribe’s shaman follows. Burton defeats the shaman using a relic as a weapon, but the act leaves him haunted by the cost of delving too deeply into forces beyond conventional law.

Burton’s attempt to return to the surface is thwarted by loss and exhaustion as he navigates sewer tunnels and recovers only fragments of the relics he has gathered. He finally emerges onto a desolate beach, where the horizon seems to hold its breath. The film then erupts into a sequence of stark, almost surreal images—an enormous wave looming in the distance—that blurs the line between reality and Burton’s apocalyptic premonition. The final moment leaves the audience uncertain whether what has happened is truly occurring in the present world or if it is the terrible culmination of Burton’s visions and the Dreamtime’s summons.

In this quiet catastrophe, the movie resists easy judgments, inviting viewers to weigh the tension between legal responsibility, ancestral memory, and the possibility that ancient forces might press into the contemporary, urban landscape. The performances—anchored by Burton’s increasingly fragile resolve and Lee’s mystic resistance—give life to a meditation on guilt, prophecy, and the fragility of human meaning when confronted with a cosmos that seems indifferent to the outcomes of a single courtroom. The film remains a stark meditation on how a single case can open a door to an older Australia, where time is braided with memory and the weather itself speaks in a language that cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence.