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Gary Bond (Zulu) stars as a restless school teacher in the desolate hellscape of the Australian Outback. On his way to Sydney for Christmas break, he becomes stranded in a frontier mining town after gambling away all his money. Some of the town’s blue-collar men take him under their wing — a seemingly kind gesture that slowly reveals an insidious outcome. The hard-living men engage in heavy drinking night after night, leading to considerable property destruction, indiscriminate womanizing, brawling, and reckless hunting of wildlife for sport. When Bond’s character finally realizes he needs to escape, the vicious cycle’s pull proves too powerful to break, leading to a potentially tragic resolution.
Directed by Ted Kotcheff, whose future films would range from the excellent First Blood to the cult comedy Weekend at Bernies, Wake in Fright is an unnerving psychological drama that helped kick off the film movement known as the ‘Australian New Wave’. It’s a provocative piece that explores the disintegration of a ‘civilized man’ to a nearly feral creature. Donald Pleasence (Halloween, Alone in the Dark) co-stars as a man who has fully embraced this wild lifestyle. He welcomes Bond to his dilapidated hovel and shows him how to survive without a job while partying all night, relying on the unbreakable bonds of male camaraderie for his basic needs.
The film’s depiction of male bonding is fascinating and disturbing. As an American in the 2020s, I’m left to wonder how much of the film is a notion of fantasy, and how much of it might be an accurate depiction of Outback living in the 1970s. Men are extremely generous and welcoming of each other in this film. Their code of conduct is almost a religion unto itself. In exchange for this open brotherhood, every man is expected to whore around, to drink as a group whenever any man desires it, and to participate in any irresponsible endeavor. It’s as though all the men have entered into a pact of mutually assured freedom from responsibility and eventual self-destruction.
Wake in Fright gets ugly and hard to watch, but its suggestions about masculinity and animal instinct linger in the memory. It almost becomes a horror film at times, especially when Pleasence takes Bond on an overnight kangaroo hunt. The sequence features deeply unsettling footage of actual kangaroo killings. This footage was part of a government-sanctioned kangaroo hunt, and was not filmed expressly for the film, but animal lovers are warned nevertheless. If the film were styled more like a traditional horror film, it might be more palatable and entertaining. But since it maintains a sense of realism and verisimilitude, it’s all the more haunting.
With Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Jack Thompson (The Sum of Us, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones), Peter Whittle, and Al Thomas.