From the very outset of [The Last Wave, an] intelligently imaginative film, Peter Weir creates an eerie sense of nature gone awry….

Supernatural forces are evidently at work. But their ways are subtle, for Weir is broaching again the gossamer mysticism he explored so superbly in his film of the Joan Lindsay novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Neither an incomplete fragment of history nor a period atmosphere are to be conjured up this time, and the current film, while hardly reaching the quality of that last one, is probably the more arduous feat: an essay on atavism set in a wholly naturalistic present, against which the strong impressions of unknown influences are thrown into startling relief. (p. 34)

[The] supernatural hints are very suavely integrated. There is, for example, a clever little scene in a pub where naturalism extends to an overlay of dialogue and the chatter of a...