Peter Weir's The Last Wave is an ambitiously conceived and dramatically executed film that combines a variety of genres—the psychological thriller, the courtroom drama, the disaster film, and the supernatural mystery—into a unique cinematic achievement. Its profound social and political implications are as unsettling as its buildup of suspense is subtle. With its linear narrative and direct, matter-of-fact tone, The Last Wave is a striking portrayal of the inner hysteria of a man and his world-order gone awry….

[The] thunderstorm shatters the ordered complacency enjoyed by lawyer David Burton … and by the white society to which he belongs. In its apocalyptic culmination, the last wave of the storm is destined to destroy the civilization that all but annihilated the continent's aborigines….

Burton loses his foothold on "reality" only to discover that it has a different level, looser in definition and related closely to the world of...