Wake in Fright 4K UHD

“World-building” has been a trendy cinematic term for the last decade. But what director Ted Kotcheff accomplishes in Wake in Fright (1971) is somehow more impressive than the fantastic geography of Middle Earth or the alien jungles of Pandora. He makes a spot right on our own planet look almost completely unrecognizable; not through the use of special effects or elaborate production design, but because every sweat-soaked square inch of Bundanyabba, a fictional backwater mining town in the Australian outback, feels like it belongs to a civilization operating by its own bizarre and unsettling rules.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young schoolteacher posted at the edge of nowhere, anxious to return to Sydney for his holiday break. But those plans are waylaid when he winds up stranded in “The Yabba” (as locals affectionately call it) after losing his travel money on a gambling binge. John is taken in by an array of local characters who lead him on an alcohol-fueled bender, testing his moral and physical fortitude while gradually stripping away the civilized veneer he desperately clings to…revealing something of the true man underneath.

Wake in Fright isn’t just a film. It’s an experience. That’s critic-speak for “you won’t just forget this one as easily as the last season of Game of Thrones.” In fact, Kotcheff’s film is so adept at getting under your skin you can almost taste the warm beer, hear the flies buzzing in your ear and feel the relentless sun cooking your brain. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the Yabba’s residents themselves; a motley group of disarmingly friendly misfits who wallow in their circumstances like pigs at a trough. Wake in Fright is the sort of movie that leaves you with one hell of a hangover.

But it’s also incredibly clever and thematically rich. Based on the 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook, the screenplay sharpens the toxic masculinity to nearly unbearable proportions, running its protagonist through a gauntlet of degrading experiences – including an infamous kangaroo hunt – that are as shockingly strenuous as any native “coming of age” ritual. The relentless male one-upmanship is like a form of social imprisonment, with every drink, wager and bad decision serving as another link in the chain. The influence on admirer Martin Scorsese’s is obvious. After Hours is essentially gives the premise a gender swap and play it for laughs. But Wake in Fright offers no easy punchlines. Everyone in the Yabba is playing for keeps.

The film has been making the physical media rounds since its Scorsese-funded restoration but we’ve finally got a version worth toasting to. Arrow’s new 4K UHD amps up the colors and shadows with Dolby Vision encoding, collects all the previous extras and adds some new ones of its own. Most notable might be the 45-minute featurette Return to the Yabba, which tours the locations in and around Broken Hill, Australia, the site of many an apocalyptic film in the ‘80s. There’s also a new commentary track, interviews and appreciation of actor Donald Pleasance, unforgettable here as the alcoholic town doctor, by film historian Kim Newman. Packaging includes a collector’s booklet and reversible sleeve.