For years, Wake in Fright was the sort of movie you heard about more often than you could actually see. It competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1971, received limited attention back home, and eventually disappeared as its original negative went missing. Editor Anthony Buckley helped track down the materials, and the restored film returned to Cannes in 2009 with Martin Scorsese among its champions. That’s an impressive journey for a picture about a man who can’t manage to get out of a small town.

John Grant (Gary Bond, Zulu) teaches at a remote outback school, a posting he regards as an unfortunate interruption on the way to a better life. With the holidays beginning, he’s eager to reach Sydney and the woman waiting for him there. First comes a stop in the mining town of Bundanyabba, which the locals affectionately call the Yabba. He plans to spend a night and catch the next train. The town, unfortunately, has other ideas.

The first few encounters seem harmless enough. A police officer, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty, in his final film), extends a welcome that includes the practically mandatory drink. Soon John is surrounded by men who regard refusing a beer as something close to a personal insult. Then he discovers two-up, a wildly popular coin-toss gambling game, and convinces himself that a quick win could solve all his problems. By the time he understands the cost of his confidence, the money that would have carried him to Sydney is gone. His holiday has become a sentence without a release date.

As John searches for a way out, he meets Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence, Halloween), an educated, extravagantly drunk physician who has made his peace with the Yabba in the worst possible way. John also falls into the company of local hard drinkers who seem determined to show their new friend a good time, whether he wants one or not. Sylvia Kay’s Janette offers another glimpse of a life spent in the town’s orbit. These encounters don’t resemble a conventional horror plot. They feel like invitations that become impossible to decline, with each new glass taking a little more control away from John.

Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, who would later make Uncommon Valor and First Blood, adapted Kenneth Cook’s novel with screenwriter Evan Jones and used Broken Hill to create a setting that seems capable of cooking its inhabitants alive. The heat isn’t merely atmospheric. It changes the way people behave, shortening tempers and turning every room into an oven. Kotcheff is especially good at the unnerving discrepancy between the townspeople’s cheerful manners and John’s mounting desperation. Pleasence is terrific as Doc, playing him as an intelligent man who can still identify a catastrophe even while participating enthusiastically in it. What begins as an awkward stopover becomes an increasingly ugly examination of belonging, masculinity, and how quickly a civilized self-image can collapse.

The kangaroo-hunting sequence is the film’s most serious obstacle, and it deserves a direct warning. Kotcheff incorporated footage of actual professional hunters killing animals. The material is distressing, and some viewers will understandably decide that seeing it is more than they’re willing to accept. The footage also makes the film’s accusations against the men involved harder to dismiss as cinematic exaggeration. Its purpose is clear; its impact is no less unpleasant for that.

What has stayed with me about Wake in Fright is how little overt villainy it needs. The locals don’t spend their days announcing bad intentions, and John isn’t an especially admirable guest. He’s arrogant, judgmental, and capable of making one bad decision after another. Yet the further he sinks, the more frightening the town becomes. By the end, a friendly offer of another beer sounds less like generosity than a threat. Few films have made a hangover feel this much like a horror story, and the Yabba is a place I’m very happy to visit only through a screen.