When a group of Indigenous activists attempt to repatriate ancestral artifacts found in a cave on Australia’s Kangaroo Island, one of them is shot evading police and taken to a local hospital. When the patient dies in her care, the doctor attending to her experiences strange visions relating to violent events from the past. As scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, 1988 was the Australian Bicentenary, and The Dreaming was one of few films to critique those celebrations by looking at the impact of colonial violence and its connection to gendered violence. Like director Mario Andreacchio’s Fair Game two years prior, The Dreaming deftly negotiates the line between an exploitation thriller and a timely social commentary that centers the female experience of violence, anchored here by a sympathetic performance by Penny Cook, then well-known from Australian TV’s A Country Practice, and some incredible yonic landscapes that give a uniquely Australian flavor to folk horror.