The Last Wave · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Water pools on a floor where no water has any business being. Outside, Sydney sits under a low, bruised sky, sodium light smeared across wet streets, and rain sheets down every pane of glass David Burton stands behind. Russell Boyd keeps shooting the lawyer from the dry side of a window — offices, courtrooms, the clean right angles of his professional life — while the wet keeps finding its way in. That leak is the whole film. Something is rising under the rational city, and the man paid to argue facts is the last to feel it at his ankles.

What happens to Burton is, in Deleuze's terms, a passage between two kinds of cinema. In the movement-image — the grammar of nearly every thriller — a person perceives a situation and acts to change it: the lawyer investigates, gathers evidence, wins or loses the case. Burton starts there. But Weir strands him. The more he learns, the less he can do, until he is reduced to looking and enduring — dreaming water, drowning, a drowned city — with no act that could resolve any of it. Deleuze calls this figure the seer, the voyant: not an agent but a watcher, someone to whom the world happens. This is the crisis of the action-image staged as a legal thriller. The courtroom plot is a Trojan horse, and inside it the sensory-motor circuit quietly dies. Burton can no longer react adequately to what he perceives, which is precisely Deleuze's cue that we have left one regime for another.

What replaces action is what Deleuze names a pure optical and sound situation — an opsign, a sonsign. These are moments when a character (and we) can only see and hear, because nothing can be done about what is seen and heard. Weir builds the film out of them, and he builds them as much from sound as from image: didgeridoo and low electronic drones, rain, the murmur of an approaching catastrophe that the score treats as premonition rather than accompaniment. The ordinary world becomes acoustically haunted. You don't watch Burton solve anything. You watch him become porous.

Here the film reaches its sharpest Deleuzian idea. Burton's premonitions are not flashbacks — nothing dated, nothing recalled. They are onirosigns, dream-images: fantasy and prophecy circuits untethered from any locatable memory, water and a wave arriving from a future that hasn't happened. And crucially, Weir refuses to cordon them off as set-pieces. Max Lemon's editing lets premonition bleed into ordinary scenes, so that we, like Burton, lose confidence in which images are real. This is the hyalosign, the crystal-image: present and dream folded so tightly together that you can no longer tell them apart. Boyd hands the editing its perfect material — Chamberlain trapped behind panes, reflections, sheeting glass, a man photographed as if already underwater. In a crystal-image the actual and the virtual keep swapping places, and a face caught in a rain-streaked window is exactly that swap made visible.

Once evidence and omen are indistinguishable, the film has entered what Deleuze calls the powers of the false. Cinema's old contract — the deposition, the exhibit, the thing that testifies to what really happened — assumes images don't lie. Weir breaks that contract on purpose. Was the killing a drunken brawl or a ritual execution under tribal law? Is Burton a lawyer or a figure out of a prophecy? The film presents these as co-true and lets neither win. This isn't muddle; it's the engine. Falsifying narration, the undecidable made into a creative principle, is what generates the dread — the sense that no fact will ever settle.

And under the whole rational city lies its cracked seam. Weir's governing spatial idea is verticality and burial: beneath the glass and concrete, a sacred underground the culture above has paved over and forgotten. That descent is the crystal cracked — the fissure, the line of flight out of an enclosed world, opening onto an apocalyptic outside the city cannot survive. It is also a stratigraphic image: an emptied ground spoken over by a buried past, white Australia built on terrain it does not understand. (Honesty demands the caveat the film itself half-earns: its 'secret lore' is Weir's dramatic invention, not documentary, and its vantage on Indigenous law is a settler's.)

None of this is invented from nothing. The premonitory editing — flash-forwards bleeding into the present, water as the master image of drowning — is lifted almost whole from Don't Look Now. The cross-cut grammar that sets Indigenous reality against uncomprehending white perception, and Gulpilil's watchful screen presence, come straight from Walkabout. The atmosphere-over-exposition look and the flat refusal to resolve a mystery are Weir and Boyd's own, worked out on Picnic at Hanging Rock and reprised here in a rain key. The Wicker Man supplied the procedural-as-trap; Rosemary's Baby, the trick of raising occult terror from bureaucratic calm and a recessive man's slow apprehension. Weir gathers these debts and formalizes them into something new: dread as a form of montage, premonition as an editing principle.

That is the significance. The Last Wave took the time-image's most demanding move — action giving way to a seer who can only watch time rise — and smuggled it inside genre, where a wide audience would feel it as suspense rather than difficulty. It seeded the whole later cycle of eco-horror and apocalyptic dread. Watch it again for the water: every scene it enters is a scene where doing has stopped and seeing has begun. The film hands you Burton's eyes, and Burton's eyes have started to fail him in the exact way that lets him, finally, see.