Dreaming the End: Peter Weir’s The Last Wave

U.S. actor Richard Chamberlain, who passed away recently at 90, will forever be remembered as television’s dashing Dr. Kildare and his performance as the shipwrecked sailor in the grand 1980 television miniseries of James Clavell’s epic novel ‘Shogun.’

But his most haunting and revelatory turn may well have been in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), a film that defies genre and easy classification. An eerie ecological thriller, an existential meditation on fate, and a supernatural legal drama woven into the lore of Australia’s Aboriginal Dreamtime, the film pulses with an apocalyptic foreboding that feels as relevant now as it did nearly fifty years ago.

Chamberlain plays David Burton, a Sydney-based lawyer who is drawn into a world of mystery and mysticism when he is assigned to defend a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder. The crime itself is a murky affair - one man dead under inexplicable circumstances after a torrential downpour in an urban alleyway. As Burton delves deeper, he begins experiencing unsettling visions: cryptic symbols, strange figures appearing in water and a mounting sense that his comfortable reality is but a thin veneer over something ancient and unrelenting.

From its opening sequence - images of an ominous storm rolling across an unforgiving Australian landscape - Weir sets the tone for a film that is both dreamlike and deeply disquieting. The film shares a kindred spirit with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), another of Weir’s enigmatic early masterpieces, where nature exerts a strange and unexplained power over the characters. If Picnic suggested a kind of malevolent void at the heart of the landscape, The Last Wave takes this a step further, insinuating that the land remembers, that it holds secrets modern Australia has ignored at its own peril.

The film is less concerned with the mechanics of legal drama and more with the inexorable pull of the unknown. As Burton, Chamberlain is all quiet repression, a man whose neatly ordered life, his prestigious legal career, his well-appointed home methodically dismantled by the forces closing in around him. He is not just investigating a case but being initiated into a deeper understanding of time, prophecy, and the cyclical destruction that has marked the land for centuries.

David Gulpilil, the great Aboriginal actor whose presence alone evokes something timeless and mysterious, plays Chris, one of the defendants who becomes Burton’s guide into this otherworldly realm.

The film thrives on ambiguity. It does not spoon-feed explanations, nor does it indulge in reductive binaries of Western rationality versus Indigenous mysticism. Instead, it presents a world in which multiple truths exist at once, where history is not linear but layered and where symbols carry meanings beyond the grasp of those who refuse to see. The Dreamtime, so central to Aboriginal cosmology, is not just a set of myths but a living, breathing continuum.

The cinematography by Russell Boyd bathes Sydney in an unearthly light. The city feels both familiar and otherworldly. The film’s use of water - torrential rains, leaking pipes, subterranean pools - reinforces the sense of an impending deluge, a reckoning long foretold. There is an eerie electronic score by Charles Wain which amplifies the tension.

If there is a single moment that encapsulates The Last Wave’s spellbinding effect, it is the final sequence. Burton, finally grasping the enormity of what he has uncovered, stands on a desolate beach, staring out at an ocean that seems to stretch beyond time itself. What he sees, or believes he sees, remains unspoken, left for the audience to decipher. Is it the beginning of a new age, or the end of the world?

Weir, who would go on to direct Gallipoli (1981), Witness (1985) and The Truman Show (1998), has always been a filmmaker attuned to the unseen forces shaping human lives.

But The Last Wave remains one of his most unsettling works. Chamberlain, so often remembered as a leading man of refined poise, here delivers a performance of quiet devastation.

As climate disasters intensify and ancient knowledge is increasingly ignored in favour of short-term convenience, The Last Wave feels eerily prescient. Its apocalyptic overtones are no longer just a product of Weir’s cinematic imagination but a warning that echoes louder with each passing storm. Perhaps we, too, are standing on the shore, staring at something vast and unfathomable, waiting for the wave to break.