Incident at Raven's Gate plays like a combination of The Picnic at Hanging Rock and Stalker (1979), although is considerably less involving in its mystery than either of these. All the building atmosphere is slow-moving and ultimately uneventful. Not to mention baffling and inexplicable – well agreed, Incident at Raven's Gate is meant to be a film about Mysteriously Unexplained Events, and the story does sound interesting in synopsis – but in practice what is going on remains frustratingly obscure. The ending in particular is completely incomprehensible. Australians also have an obsession with motorcars, bodgie anti-culture and anti-authoritarianism, which has fueled such films as Mad Max (1979), Dead-End Drive-In (1986) and Metal Skin (1994) and at least provides the film’s only amusing image – that of a car chase between a bogan and a cop where each other’s respective car stereos mysteriously swap between playing punk music and opera.

Director Rolf de Heer can never be accused of making predictable and conventional films. He went on to make the REALLY strange Bad Boy Bubby (1993), as well as Dance Me to My Song (1998), The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2001), The Tracker (2002) and Alexandra’s Project (2003), all of which exhibit an interest in visiting highly unusual headspaces. His greatest success with arthouse audiences was the Aboriginal film Ten Canoes (2005). Rolf de Heer made two other ventures into science-fiction with Epsilon (1997), where a mysterious alien visitor appears in the Outback, and Dr Plonk (2007), a slapstick time travel film.