The Dreaming 1988

On a remote island off the south coast of Australia, a tomb of Aboriginal origin is opened by Professor Bernard Thornton, Arthur Dignam. His daughter, Dr. Cathy Thornton, Penny Cook, tends to Warindji Kristina Nehm in a hospital emergency room after an unspecified injury. Despite efforts to resuscitate her, the girl experiences ventricular tachycardia and dies, a loss that leaves Cathy shaken and haunted. That night, she is tormented by a vision of the girl standing outside her bedroom window, and soon after, a band of brutal whaling fishermen seems to storm into her home, a sequence that blurs the line between waking fear and nightmare.

The next morning brings even heavier news: Cathy is informed that her mother has died. After paying her respects at the funeral, she travels to visit her father, who has returned to the island. She informs her boyfriend Geoff, Gary Sweet, that she plans to return to work, but a different resolve pulls her toward the coast instead. While driving through the forest, she is once again confronted by the apparitions of the whalers, and the eerie figures close in around her car. She withdraws to a small inn in the nearby fishing village, where a nightmarish dream revisits the whalers harming a young Aboriginal woman, leaving her shaken and unsettled.

At daybreak, Cathy boards a boat back to the island and reunites with her father. Bernard resumes his archaeological dig and uncovers artifacts left behind by the whalers, including fishing spears, relics that hint at a brutal chapter in the island’s history. Geoff, taught by concern, tracks Cathy to the island, adding a human link to the growing mystery. That night, Cathy envisions Geoff’s boat being sunk by a whalership’s attack, a nightmare that ends with Geoff appearing in the doorway, very much alive but deeply affected by the island’s dark legacy.

Geoff discovers a journal tucked among Bernard’s collected artifacts, chronicling the whalers’ brutalization and massacre of an Aboriginal tribe upon their arrival on the island in 1856. A nearby fire is lit by Bernard, drawing Geoff to investigate, and Cathy finds herself suddenly under siege as Bernard, now possessed by the spirits of the whalers, seems to channel the past’s violence. The assault becomes a physical and spiritual rupture: the aborigine spirit realm fractures under the weight of these murders, and Cathy must flee into the night.

She staggers outside to find Geoff’s speared and hanged body, a shocking sight that leaves her with nowhere to hide but the island’s looming lighthouse. Bernard, still under the whalers’ possession, closes in, forcing a desperate chase to the top of the lighthouse. In a last, decisive act of self-preservation, Cathy pushes Bernard to his death, ending the immediate threat but leaving the island’s unsettled history to loom over her. The film closes on the distressing acknowledgment that the past’s vicious wounds echo across the present, shaping Cathy’s fate as she confronts the ghosts of the whalers and the price of uncovering a hidden chapter in the island’s story.