Deliverance? Straw Dogs? Terrifying Aussie film Wake in Fright is every bit their equal

Nick Cave called it “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence,” and he wasn’t fucking around. Considered lost until a negative surfaced in 2004, Wake in Fright is a savage piece of filmmaking, and every bit as pummelling as either Deliverance or Straw Dogs—the two contemporary films that it most resembles.

Made in 1971 by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, the film plops an urbane schoolteacher into the Australian outback and then proceeds to kick the shit out of him, psychologically, physically, and finally in ways that catapult matters into a whole new realm of nightmarish. It’s not giving too much away to state that John Grant—as played by the handsomely refined and deliciously cast Brit actor Gary Bond—is willing eventually to consider suicide over another night in the town known as ‘the Yabba.’

The premise here is already scary enough—not least of all because Kotcheff seems to have captured the authentic mood of a remote, derelict, wantonly violent outback shithole—but Wake in Fright is really elevated by its performances. If Donald Pleasance is better and more ambiguously threatening in anything, I haven’t seen it. In other words, don’t miss. And if I can’t convince you, how about Martin Scorsese: “Wake in Fright is a deeply—and I mean deeply—unsettling and disturbing movie. I saw it when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless…”

The restored Wake in Fright screens at the Vancity Theatre on Friday and Saturday (March 29-30)