Wake in Fright (1971)

“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. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically and psychologically, it’s beautifully calibrated and it gets under your skin one encounter at a time, right along with the protagonist played by Gary Bond. I’m excited that Wake in Fright has been preserved and restored and that it is finally getting the exposure it deserves.” — Martin Scorsese (director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas)

“Kotcheff’s film is raw and uncompromised, well-acted, brilliantly photographed and edited… It’s rare to find a film that goes for broke and says to hell with the consequences….it’s not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing.” — Roger Ebert

SYNOPSIS

Civilization proves a remarkably thin veneer in Ted Kotcheff’s ferocious Australian nightmare, a descent into alcohol, gambling, violence, and masculine self-destruction set beneath the merciless glare of the Outback sun. Gary Bond stars as John Grant, an educated schoolteacher desperate to escape his remote posting for the Christmas holidays, only to become stranded in the mining town of Bundanyabba after an ill-advised night of drinking and gambling leaves him virtually penniless. The locals greet him not with hostility but overwhelming generosity: every stranger offers another beer, another wager, another invitation, until hospitality begins to feel indistinguishable from entrapment. As Grant falls in with an alcoholic doctor (Donald Pleasence) and a group of hard-drinking townsmen, his cultivated sense of superiority steadily gives way to the very appetites and impulses he imagines himself above. Kotcheff turns the vastness of the Australian landscape into a paradoxically claustrophobic prison, culminating in a notorious kangaroo-hunting sequence of almost unbearable brutality. Neither quite horror film nor social drama, Wake in Fright is something more unsettling: a savage study of masculinity in which the terrifying discovery is not that Grant has entered an alien world, but that he may have belonged there all along.

Wake in Fright screens as part of our limited series, Not So Merry and Bright, spotlighting a handful of not-so-festive holiday classics from the alternative Christmas movie canon.