A Sydney lawyer defends five Aboriginal Persons in a ritualized taboo murder and in the process learns disturbing things about himself and premonitions.
A Sydney lawyer has more to worry about than higher-than-average rainfall when he is called upon to defend five Aboriginals in court. Determined to break their silence and discover the truth behind the hidden society he suspects lives in his city, the Lawyer is drawn further, and more intimately, into a prophesy that threatens a new Armageddon, wherein all the continent shall drown.—David Carroll <[email protected]>
David Burton is a successful corporate tax lawyer based in Sydney. He's married, has two kids and all in all leads a pretty nice life. He hasn't been sleeping well lately and has been having bad dreams, something his step-father tells him he used to have frequently as a young boy. He's hired to defend five urban Aborigines who are accused of having killed an acquaintance, Billy Corman, who stole sacred objects from them. He is unnerved when he realizes he's seen one of his clients, Chris Lee, in one of his dreams and also seen some of the sacred objects. As he explores the Aborigines belief system he enters a forbidden world - and one that shows him the apocalypse,—garykmcd
In Sydney, Australian legal aide asks lawyer David Burton to assist on a case defending five urban aborigine men - Chris, Gerry, Jocko, Larry and Lindsey - charged with manslaughter of another urban aborigine, Billy Corman. They asked David, a corporate tax lawyer, solely because he is the one person they knew who had some, albeit little, experience dealing with aborigines in his work. The story is that during one of the latest in a series of violent and freak storms to hit Australia, the men got into a drunken fight outside a bar, Billy was knocked to the ground, and he died drowning in a pool of water. Not saying much, the men charged deny killing Billy, which David initially believes, but he also has a feeling that, through their silence, the men know who killed Billy. Reading between the lines of what the men say and reading about another case, David begins to believe that Billy's death may have actually been a tribal killing despite none of the accused or Billy being tribal men. The case takes on a new meaning when David meets Chris for the first time, he who is the mysterious figure in some of the nightmares that have kept David up even before this case began. As David continues to have somewhat cryptic discussions with Chris and another mysterious aborigine named Charlie, as David's nightmares continue, as he learns about incidents from his childhood from his stepfather, and as the storms become more unusual, David changes the focus of his thoughts from the case itself to what happened to Billy within the bigger picture and his own place within it all.—Huggo
The seemingly normal life of Sydney lawyer David Burton (Chamberlain) is turned upside-down when he takes on a murder case and discovers that he shares a strange and unexplained mystical connection to five Aboriginal men. Written and directed by Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Master and Commander).
The film opens with a montage of scenes of daily life in Australia in the 1970s: a rural school in the desert with children playing, the main street of an outback town, a traffic jam in the city.... all being affected by unusually adverse weather conditions that suddenly appear. Heavy rainfall followed by unusually large chunks of hail breaking through the windows of the school injuring students, a frog infestation and other anomalies. Only the local Aboriginal people seem to recognize the cosmological significance of these weather phenomena.
During one of these freak rainstorms in Sydney, an altercation occurs among a group of Aboriginal people in a pub which results in a mysterious drowning death. At the coroner's inquest, the death is ruled a homicide and four of the Aboriginal men are accused of murder. Through the Australian Legal Aid system, a lawyer named David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) is procured for their defense. Due to internal politics and the eschatological divide between the European settlers and Indigenous people, the circumstances by which he was contacted and retained are unusual in that his law practice is corporate taxation and not criminal defense. He is reluctant at first but is intrigued by the challenge and takes on the case, which shortly leads to his professional and personal life beginning to unravel.
Burton starts having bizarre dreams involving running water, drowned corpses, and one of being visited in his home by one of the incarcerated Aboriginals named Chris Lee (David Gulpilil), whom he had never met. When later introduced to the four accused men in prison, he recognizes Lee and begins to sense an otherworldly connection to him and to the increasingly strange weather phenomena besetting the city. His dreams intensify along with his obsession with the murder case and he comes to suspect that the murder was an Aboriginal tribal execution in which a curse is put on the victim simply by pointing a bone at him. Lee refuses to admit that he is tribal or reveals anything about the murder but tells Burton that his dreams have meaning because he is "Mulkurul"; descended from a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bringing sacred objects with them.
After meeting with the shaman of Lee's tribe and learning more about Aboriginal practices and the concept of Dreamtime as a parallel world of existence, Burton comes to believe that his dreams and the strange heavy rain bode as signs of a coming apocalypse. After another intense dream, Burton senses danger and persuades his wife to leave the city with their children right before a torrential storm causes a flooding disaster.
In the chaos of the flood, Lee manages to escape from prison to find Burton and take him down through subterranean tunnels under the city which lead to a sacred Aboriginal ritual site. Lee shows him the entrance to another ancient chamber nearby that is strangely familiar to him and sends him off to find the answers that he seeks. In the chamber, Burton sees a painting on the ceiling depicting the arrival of European explorers from South America and a calendrical prophecy of a cataclysmic oceanic disaster. He finds a collection of ancient relics, a decayed corpse of a man wearing middle-age Western garments and a stone mask which after close inspection, bears a face identical to his own. He collects as many relics as he can carry but is suddenly confronted by the tribe's shaman shouting and lunging at him. They struggle and Burton kills the shaman with one of the stone relics. He tries to find his way back to the surface through the sewer tunnels, but he loses the relics along the way.
In the morning, Burton finally emerges through a drain pipe exhausted, then collapses on the beach and stares entranced at the horizon. He realizes that he can never go back to his old life after what had just happened. Then we see the look of both shock and acceptance on his face as the screen is filled by footage of a surreal towering ocean wave, though it remains unclear whether we are witnessing reality or sharing in Burton's final apocalyptic premonition.
