Wake in Fright (initially released as Outback outside Australia) is a 1971 Australian New Wave film directed by Ted Kotcheff, written by Evan Jones, and starring Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay and Jack Thompson.

Based on Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel of the same name, it follows a young schoolteacher who descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.

Despite attracting positive reviews at the time, the film was a commercial failure in Australia, in part due to scant marketing by United Artists, as well as controversy surrounding its portrayal of outback life, including a hunting scene in which real kangaroos are shot and killed.

By the 1990s, Wake in Fright had developed a cult reputation as Australia's great "lost film" because its master negative had gone missing, resulting in censored prints of degraded quality being used for its few television broadcasts and VHS releases.

Wake in Fright is now considered a pivotal film of both the Australian New Wave[12] and the Ozploitation cycle,[13] earning praise from contemporary critics for Kotcheff's direction and the cast's performances.

John Grant is a young, middle-class schoolteacher who feels disgruntled because of the onerous terms of a financial bond that he signed with the government in return for receiving a tertiary education.

It is the start of the Christmas holidays, and John plans on going to Sydney to see his girlfriend Robyn, but first he must travel by train to the nearby mining town of Bundanyabba – affectionately nicknamed "The Yabba" by the locals – in order to catch a Sydney-bound flight.

There he meets the local policeman, Jock Crawford, who befriends him after both drink repeated glasses of beer, first at the pub and then at an RSL club, where they witness an unnerving ANZAC memorial service.

Crawford then introduces him to the illegal game of two-up, and to Clarence "Doc" Tydon, a vagrant, alcoholic medical practitioner who questions John's contemptuous view of The Yabba and its populace.

After providing him with medicine to cure his hangover and feeding him on kangaroo meat, Doc expounds his worldview onto John, revealing that his alcoholism and self-sufficient attitude to life prevented him from practicing in Sydney.

The four then vandalize a bush pub, where Dick and Joe engage in a playful fight that turns brutal, interrupting Doc as he lectures an unconscious John about the violent nature of civilization despite its philosophical and materialistic trappings.

After discarding one suitcase – mostly containing textbooks, including one on Plato – he wanders through the desert towards Sydney, hitch-hiking with truck drivers where possible and procuring food using the rifle he was given during the hunt.

As stated by writer Stephen Vagg, "the first masterpiece of the revived Australian film industry" was "directed by a Canadian, from a script by a Jamaican, with a Norwegian producer and finance from an American fridge manufacturer.

[11] The shooting of Wake in Fright began in January 1970 in the mining town of Broken Hill, (the area which had inspired Cook for the setting of his novel), with interiors shot the next month at Ajax Studios in the Sydney beach-side suburb of Bondi.

"[26] In his 1972 review for The New York Times, Roger Greenspun praised the film for its atmosphere "of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror and that is not quite like anything else I can remember feeling at the movies.

Certain science-fiction films come closest to it, especially those in which some evil alien presence has taken over a community that to all outward appearances remains normal—with only the slightest most fugitive hint that something somehow is hideously wrong"; he also admitted to finding the memorial service at the RSL club to be more disturbing than the kangaroo hunting sequences, and praised the performances of the cast, particularly Kay and Thomas.

"[28] Gillian Hanson of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Canadian director Ted Kotcheff has captured the mindless brutality of life in the outback with extraordinary felicity ...

Yet, despite its unmistakable competence, the film's bite is blunted by the script's shallow and largely unmotivated characterisation of John Grant, and by the loosely-knit and over-melodramatic story line which never achieves thematic coherence.

"[34] Don Groves of SBS gave the film four stars out of five, claiming that "Wake in Fright deserves to rank as an Australian classic as it packs enormous emotional force, was bravely and inventively directed, and features superb performances.

For this reason and because the survival of the Australian kangaroo is seriously threatened, these scenes were shown uncut after consultation with the leading animal welfare organisations in Australia and the United Kingdom.The hunt lasted several hours, and gradually wore down the filmmakers.

[46] Wake in Fright was released on DVD and Blu-ray formats by Madman Entertainment on 4 November 2009,[47] based on a digital restoration completed earlier that year.