[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 s...

Weir's occultism isn't even faintly erotic, and except for the first sequence The Last Wave is over-deliberate; the camera movements are ominous as if by habit. Visually, the film is active until the first shot of [David Burton], a Sydney corporation lawyer. Every time he appears, the camera seems to hold on him—and the film croaks out. (p. 533)

Peter Weir's The Last Wave is an ambitiously conceived and dramatically executed film that combines a variety of genres—the psychological thriller, the courtroom drama, the disaster film, and the supernatural mystery—into a unique cinematic achievement. Its profound social and political implications are as unsettling as its buildup of suspense is subtle. With its linear narrative and direct, matter-of-fact tone, The Last Wave is a striking portrayal of the inner hysteria of a man and hi...

From the very outset of [The Last Wave, an] intelligently imaginative film, Peter Weir creates an eerie sense of nature gone awry…. Supernatural forces are evidently at work. But their ways are subtle, for Weir is broaching again the gossamer mysticism he explored so superbly in his film of the Joan Lindsay novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Neither an incomplete fragment of history nor a period atmosphere are to be conjured up this time, and the current film, while hardly reaching the quality of that las...

["The Last Wave"] begins so brilliantly and with such promise that it's no real surprise that the closer it gets to its apocalypse, the less effective it becomes. The film's payoff is decidedly small, recalling nothing more esoteric than the discovery of the elephants' graveyard in one of the early Tarzan movies. Yet until we arrive at this breathless anticlimax, "The Last Wave" is a movingly moody shock-film, composed entirely of the kind of variations on mu...