AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

magnuslhad A school teacher, an educated, slightly aloof man, makes a brief stop in an outback town on his way to meet his fiancé in Sydney. The local law enforcer, a too-matey patriarchal figure, befriends him, and the teacher is drawn into the underbelly of the town's drinking and gambling culture, beginning an inexorable descent into hell. The film perfectly captures an enduring moment in Australian masculinity, the "mate" culture and suicidal binge drinking, the carnivalesque attitude to authority, the incongruous connections to empire. At first the teacher pinches his nose, sneering at the stagey tribute to war dead, decrying the gambling to a fellow intellectual, a doctor. But the doctor turns out to be a shape-shifter, as central to the Bacchanalian insanity as anyone. The rawness of the drinking, the ugliness of the alcohol-fuelled revelry, the despair of women, the savagery of a kangaroo hunt - this film offers up so many iconic images, powerful, insightful moments that fully utilise cinema's potential. Rightly regarded as a classic of Australian cinema, this is a fine example of the mirror to society's failing that 1970s filmmaking excelled in.

craig-king-893-295189 A lot of films have tried to capture the isolation and expanse of the Australian landscape, but few have laid it bare as raw and honestly as this film does.Made in the year of my birth, it shows an older Australia, which, for the most part, is no longer visible to the naked eye in the capital cities, yet still lingers at it's core.This should be added to the national curriculum to show how far we've come, and how much we don't want to lose.At it's heart it shows the struggle between the haves and have nots, in an environment of Australian (class-less) egalitarianism.

yajji Wake in Fright is about a part of Australia that seems to have been clean forgotten. It is a snapshot of a history and life that was swept under a rug, largely due to the colonisation of the country. Very few Australians will be familiar with the Outback aside from a vague familiarity, nor will they be aware of the threateningly machismo life portrayed in Wake in Fright, but it is a life that does exist, far beyond the fringes of the city, in the hauntingly beautiful Outback. The narrative is based on a book of the same time, about a schoolteacher from the city who finds himself in rural Australia doing teaching work for money. During his stay, he ends up in a landlocked, isolated town in the barren Australian desert colloquially called the "Yabba". The primitive way of life here initially floors the well-to-do citizen, but the town and strips back his polished city exterior. The undoing of a polite, cultured gentleman at the hands of derelict desert folk is actually one of the most disturbing aspects of this film. I kept thinking that this man (John is his name) was going to fall victim to a horrible act of violence by the group of eccentric, predominantly wasted townspeople. But instead, the film takes a different route, a far more disturbing one, and places John at the centre of the depravity. He does not fall victim to their behaviour, rather he participates in it until it ravages him almost to the point of no return. The shred of credibility and decency that John has left sees him flee the town. He has had a taste of a more simplistic, animalistic, impulsive existence, but the city life has not allowed him to fully amalgamate himself within this recklessly masculine crowd.The film is masterfully well made. The scrumptious, beautiful colours and settings of the Outback are so rich and bare that they almost become surreal. Director Ted Kotcheff isn't the first person to see the Outback as a foreboding and menacing place, but he has probably helped solidified this view in one of the most memorable ways. The performances are all excellent and you wouldn't know Donald Pleasance is a British veteran actor, because he has got the role of a grubby small town man down to a tee. In fact, all of the actors who portrayed the inhabitants of the Yabba really do seem like they were plucked off the street, they have a naturalism that compliments the film and makes it all the more frightening. Brian West, the cinematographer, deserves much credit too. The heat of the Australian summer is so palpable and raw that it feels as though you are there, in those ramshackle pubs, with sweat from your forehead dripping into your beer (which is almost never empty thanks to the "hospitable" locals). It is such a visceral, often menacing and gut-wrenching experience.I highly recommend this film. It really is incomparable to anything I've ever seen. It isn't really a commonplace thriller, but rather a drama about a way of life that has been forgotten, in favour of a more polished existence. Australia is a fascinating country because it is home to both the city and the rural, timeless outback... very contradictory realities. But sometimes when these very alternate ways of existence meet, chaos ensues. The result is intoxicating.

grantss A good Australian drama that had the potential to be great. The background and setup were excellent. As you go further into the story you feel more and more trapped, as the lead character is. The writer and director take you on a downward spiral of alcoholism and hellscape-entrapment. It is suffocating, the lead character's predicament, and plays out almost like a horror movie. You can check out but you can never leave...The movie also shows the pointlessness and futurelessness of rural redneck life.However, from a point is almost starts to glamorize this lifestyle. There are several consecutive scenes that are quite irritating to watch: the drunken parties, the random kangaroo killings, the general drunken boganism. While this shows what awaits the lead character, it is very annoying.A tighter script around the 2/3rds mark and a grittier follow- through on the setup and this would have been a brilliant movie.