[Weir's] films—lush, beckoning fantasies, promising exotic vistas from strange new lands—have a seductiveness befitting an emergent cinema. Unfortunately, Weir's deftness with 'atmosphere' seems to have been developing at the expense of any narrative or thematic sense. The tantalising promise of Picnic at Hanging Rock was that the lush, repressed romanticism of its Victorian girls' school setting might have become its subject—implying that it was the secretiveness and fearfulness of this culture that had generated the unsolved mystery of the plot. But unwilling or unable to make more of this, Weir used his lyricism largely to fill in holes in the story: creating minor mysteries about incidental characters and generally wrapping events in mystical cotton wool. Such, more or less, is what has also happened to The Last Wave…. (pp. 121-22)
It is a film of disparate elements, which take a long time to slide into focus. The first half hour of so is the kind of allusive, foreboding scene-setting which is Weir's specialty: in a desert township, a sudden rainstorm and then huge chunks of ice come crashing out of a cloudless sky; in Sydney, freak weather conditions make the rush-hour traffic even more trying for lawyer David Burton…. David begins to suffer from recurrent nightmares of a dark, indistinct figure, approaching him through watery hallucinations….
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