Wake in Fright

'The best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence'
- Nick Cave
'Powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing... It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says to hell with the consequences'
- Roger Ebert
'a lost weekend in the dark heart of white Australia' ★★★★★
- Guardian
★★★★★ Empire
★★★★ Time Out
★★★★ Evening Standard

Ted Kotcheff's lost cult classic centres on John Grant (Gary Bond), a cynical, hard-drinking young man, resentful of his lot in life and forced into a job he hates, teaching at a primary school in the remote Australian Outback.

Embarking on a trip to Sydney for the holidays, he finds himself marooned in a town filled with nightmarish characters who rob him of his money and seem determined for him never to leave.

Stunningly shot and rich with a powerful sense of dread, Wake in Fright ranks on a par with more celebrated paranoid thrillers and road movies of the time, and is at once a tense drama and a vivid testimony to the early-’70s mood of unease and socio-political turbulence.

A new digital restoration does full justice to this forgotten film.