"For decades, Wake in Fright (aka Outback in the UK and US) was cinema's pre-Cern Higgs Boson particle, a theoretical keystone in the construction of the New Australian Cinema of the 1970s, and its gap-toothed relative, the Ocker Comedy. Released in the same year – 1971 – as Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, Ted Kotcheff's psychodrama has been variously cited as a precursor for Mad Max, a jumpstart for a national film industry, and, by the reckoning of Rex Reed and Nick Cave, the greatest Australian film ever made... John Grant's odyssey, for all its excesses, forms a neatly symmetrical, perfectly Kafkaesque narrative." - Tara Brady, Irish Times