The tagline on the DVD cover of director Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright reads “Sweat, dust and beer … there’s nothing else out here mate!”



In one sense that line encapsulates the eerie mundanity of Kotcheff’s sun-scorched thriller, set in an outback town where intense temperature, desolate landscape and excessive alcohol consumption take a devastating toll on an unprepared visitor. In another, it belies Wake in Fright’s psychological complexity. There may not be much else in the film’s central location, Bundanyabba (known as “The Yabba”), other than heat, grog and dirt, but there’s a great deal going on beneath the film’s sparse looking surface.

Kotcheff’s opening shot is a circular pan of parched Australian desert, a vast blanket of orange dirt uninterrupted by railway tracks, a station and a school house. Watching Wake in Fright on DVD, the graininess of that opening moment has been intentionally retained when the film was digitally restored. The process of restoration is a story itself. Original versions of the film were lost for decades, the negative eventually found in a Pittsburgh vault marked for destruction.



Wake in Fright packs a hell of an atmospheric punch – from editor Anthony Buckley’s rapidcut montages to the colours of cinematographer Brian West, whose humid array of hues make an already hot-looking landscape feel unbearably unwelcoming.



Perhaps it is ironic that such a landmark Australian film, rightfully heralded as one of our greatest, was directed by a Canadian, stars an Englishman (Gary Bond) and was adapted for the screen (from a superb novel by journalist Kenneth Cook) by Jamaican-born Evan Jones. Then again, that might partly explain Wake in Fright’s dark chemistry: how it looks and sounds, and how its production values are startlingly well-synched to the psychology of its protagonist.



John (Bond), a teacher who intends to stop off in The Yabba for a single night, is repulsed and fascinated by the strange and treacherous wilderness around him and the people who inhabit it.



Similarly, Kotcheff’s view of Australia is that of a rugged, harsh and unforgiving place, where men turn into animals and life is more or less meaningless. The first of Wake in Fright’s pub-set scenes occurs six minutes in and there’s plenty more beer where that came from. There is mirth along the way but madness and gloom when the keg runs dry.



The message, if there is one, extends much deeper than a finger waving tut-tut about alcohol consumption and recklessness. Beer is soaked into John’s experience of The Yabba as if it were a slow-acting toxin, a gradually pervading force not dissimilar (especially in colour and mental effect) to the sun bearing down above him. It is through provision of alcohol the perverse generosity of The Yabba’s inhabitants is demonstrated. They not only want John to be one of them, but feel a righteous indignation in making it so. Eventually, after a wild weekend, he snaps.



“What’s the matter with you people?” John hollers. “You can burn your house down, murder your wife, rape your child. But if I don’t have don’t have a drink with you – if I don’t have a flaming bloody drink with you – that’s a criminal offence! That’s the end of the bloody world!”



The alcohol John consumes acts as a magnet drawing him back to an ever-bleary state of mind, similar to the Twilight Zone-like force that keeps him stranded in The Yabba. Kotcheff presents this foul but weirdly charitable place as a kind of proto destination en route to Oliver Stone’s U-Turn, where dark magic kept Sean Penn captive in an Arizona town; or a Hotel California, a place you can check out of but never leave.



Wake in Fright’s notorious kangaroo hunting sequences (which were real) take the film’s exploration of Australiana to a deeper and more penetrating level. The focus on sun, beer, blokes, sport and camaraderie hardly surprises – but the roo-hunting scenes (including, disturbingly, hand-to-animal combat) capture something else. It’s as if Kotcheff is hacking into our sense of national ethos, cutting traditional images of Australian identity to the bone.



It all gets too much for our beleaguered anti-hero. If Meursault in Camus’s The Outsider killed an Arab on the beach because he was hot and bothered, John in Wake in Fright takes that existential despair – tormented partly by pure happenstance – to a heightened level.



The film presents a vision of world without purpose, where boredom breeds obscenity. People drink because they can; they gamble because they can; they shoot things because they can; they yell and shout and fight because they can. “Discontent is a luxury of the well to-do,” says the alcoholic doctor John befriends. Across Australia’s more privileged plains, that line still resonates. And so does this enduring masterpiece.