There is one shot in Richard Franklin’s 1981 masterpiece Roadgames that reflects road stripes onto the face of truck driver Pat Quid (Stacey Keach) as he stares intently at the road ahead. It’s a great touch inside a tremendous piece of filmmaking.

Pat is a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway, where mobility and desolation run concurrently and slowly fester into a foreboding, pot-boiling atmosphere of dread and danger. On the road with a truck full of pig carcasses and a pet dingo, Pat passes time by playing road games - initially I-Spy activities with a hitcher, and then, as tension and loneliness curve into desperation, something much more disturbing and menacing.

According the news a serial killer may be loose on the highway, picking up hitchhikers and dumping their bodies in the desert. Pat reckons he knows who the killer is - at least what car he drives - but in the process of tracking the man down, he becomes a prime suspect.

Roadgames was the successor to Franklin’s superb psychological thriller Patrick (1978), both of which still make intense white-knuckle experiences, told with tremendously absorbing craft from a master Australian auteur. Franklin’s other credits include Psycho II (1983), a lovely adaptation of Aussie playwright Hannie Rayson’s Hotel Sorrento (1995) and, most recently, the claustrophobic Radha Mitchell thriller Visitors (2003).

In many ways Roadgames shares strong similarities with Spielberg’s Duel (1971) but outdraws it in many ways. Everett De Roche’s script (he also wrote Patrick and Visitors) is lyrical and probing and Franklin’s direction - this is no understatement - resembles Hitchcock and early Polanski.

This is one of the best Australian films ever made: a gripping, frightening, rollicking ride.