After meeting with the shaman of Lee's tribe and learning more about Aboriginal practices and the concept of Dreamtime as a parallel world of existence, Burton comes to believe that his dreams and the strange heavy rain bode as signs of a coming apocalypse. Lee refuses to admit that he is tribal or reveals anything about the murder but tells Burton that his dreams have meaning because he is "Mulkurul" descended from a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bringing sacred objects with them. His dreams intensify along with his obsession with the murder case and he comes to suspect that the murder was an Aboriginal tribal execution in which a curse is put on the victim simply by pointing a bone at him. When later introduced to the four accused men, he recognizes Lee and begins to sense an otherworldly connection to him and to the increasingly strange weather phenomena besetting the city. He is reluctant at first but is intrigued by the challenge and takes on the case, which shortly leads to his professional and personal life beginning to unravel.īurton starts having bizarre dreams involving running water, drowned corpses, and one of being visited in his home by one of the incarcerated Aboriginals named Chris Lee ( David Gulpilil), whom he had never met. Due to internal politics and the eschatological divide between the European settlers and Indigenous people, the circumstances by which he was contacted and retained are unusual in that his law practice is corporate taxation and not criminal defence. Through the Australian Legal Aid system, a lawyer named David Burton ( Richard Chamberlain) is procured for their defence. At the coroner's inquest, the death is ruled a homicide and four of the Aboriginal men are accused of murder. Only the local Aboriginal people seem to recognize the cosmological significance of these weather phenomena.ĭuring one of these freak rainstorms in Sydney, an altercation occurs among a group of Aboriginal people in a pub which results in a mysterious drowning death. Heavy rainfall followed by unusually large chunks of hail breaking through the windows of the school injuring students, a frog infestation and other anomalies. The film opens with a montage of scenes of daily life in Australia in the 1970s: A rural school in the desert with children playing, the main street of an outback town, a traffic jam in the city, all being affected by unusually adverse weather conditions that suddenly appear. It is about a white solicitor in Sydney whose seemingly normal life is disrupted after he takes on a murder case and discovers that he shares a strange, mystical connection with the small group of local Aboriginal people accused of the crime. The Last Wave (also released in the United States as Black Rain) is a 1977 Australian mystery drama film directed by Peter Weir.
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