Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Boring

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Blistering performances.

The scenes of the Australian outback were stunning, The acting was overly theatrical and punctuated with bizarre hand gestures. The characters never develop any depth so your reaction is purely based on visuals - Headmistress; Callous, French teacher; Fake, Dance teacher; Simpering, Miranda; Queen Bee Flake with the usual followers. The older couple having a picnic sitting like wooden dummies? The boy driven to attempt to find the girls - driven by what? The glimpse of a black clad ankle? The token LUG? Kept waiting for something - anything to happen. Yawn.

This is my favorite film I've seen in 2017 so far. I quite simply have not been able to stop thinking about it. One of Australia's most well-loved films, in this movie- part period-drama, part mystery, part terrifying horror film- 3 schoolgirls and a teacher go missing on a mysterious rock in the Australian outback. This is a mystery with no solution- but you wouldn't want there to be one. It's like what Morgan Freeman says in The Shawshank Redemption: sometimes words can't do something justice. A true ending would only unravel the movie's haunting, heartbreaking story and ruin the atmosphere and spoil the many equally fascinating interpretations. I see it as a story about sexuality, Peter Weir (Wow, why isn't he more famous? His direction here is genius) sees it as a film about nature, others describe it as a film about colonialism. This is such an interesting, fascinating film with so much to say, and it's backed with amazing performances, brilliant visuals and a complex, chilling and heart-breaking script. Occasionally the pace is slow, but who cares to be honest. Aside from the fact that maybe showing a bit more of how the community outside of the school reacts to the disappearances, there really is hardly anything wrong with this movie. Both a haunting yet beautiful dream and a captivating drama, this is truly a work of art. 9/10

You can read whatever you want into the disappearance of three girls and their watcher/headmistress while on holiday in 1900 Australia at a place called Hanging Rock. That is what makes Picnic at Hanging Rock intriguing but what also, I imagine, was frustrating for certain viewers coming out at the end. Americans generally want a mystery solved at the end of the day, whatever it is, and if it isn't, if things are left ambiguous or just left up in the air, it doesn't translate into ginormous box office or widespread attention (Fincher's Zodiac suffered that problem, though has been reevaluated as a landmark by many). With 'Hanging Rock', Peter Weir crafts a story from Joan Lindsey's novel that favors atmosphere and setting a particular, dreamy, almost-forgotten-but-in-the-wind style over story, but when you look at what plot is there it's actually compelling, especially for what comes after the main event is like watching a slow-moving, delicately staged car wreck, if that makes sense.We see this group of girls go to this Hanging Rock, and four of them going off on their own to explore (a Boticcelli reference happens too, from a picture book to seeing the girls walk away, there's more significance there that I can't point to but I know it's there). They climb and explore, with one girl sort of complaining and trailing behind (in the end, she'll be the one not to disappear), and when the midday malaise and doldrums hits, the girls just get up, walk slowly (or shot in slow-motion), and they're just... gone. Unlike Antonioni's L'Aventurra, which was also notable for a story where a character goes missing and the mystery is existential in nature, we do see these girls in the moment they vanish. But... what exactly happens? Many theories have been posited, from the basic (they fell down a hole, with only one of them getting out, the one who does, eventually, get rescued), to the more outlandish (aliens, which I wouldn't think far off given the mood). One thing is for sure, Weir doesn't make things very naturalistic in his direction, from simple things like when one of the girls opens a gate, turns her head as birds flap around in the sky and there are images transposed onto one another of her looking, the birds, the Hanging Rock itself. Or the music, which has an air at times of being very early-Man with its pan-flute sound, and then at other times sounds like an Italian horror movie, with the dread and over-the-top style that comes with that sound. But this is contrasted with realistic but restrained acting that's meant to reflect the period, especially from the head-master played by a very effective and cold Rachel Roberts.But this restrained feeling is something that bursts open, like one of the corsets one of the women or girls wears that just pops out and when emotion just over-flows. There's a great sense of how there is radical change in how the girls feel about things, since Miranda (Lambert) is one of the girls gone and the one who was kind of a leader in the group. When she exits, the girls are left with no one, and when the one girl returns it's like a pack of wolves snaps out. That is an extremely affecting scene, where things escalate very quickly but it doesn't seem outside the scope of reason. It helps that the setting is at a girl's preparatory school where everything has to be orderly and though not too harsh in discipline (we don't see anyone hit or punished in abuse) there is this sense of 'be straight, do what you're told, oh and don't forget to pay that tuition or you're out). And a lot of the struggle between what to do and what to say is seen in the character of Sarah, who can talk but is so shy she barely says a word (an orphan, of course), and this disappearance hits her the hardest of all.I loved seeing how little by little the school comes apart; it would be one thing to make the story just about the girls being gone, but the author and Weir as adapter know that's just not enough to sustain the narrative. There is no one real protagonist here - except maybe the Rock itself, which has its own ominous glow to it, one of the great rocks in movies alongside the monolith in 2001, full of its own grandiose, eerie enchantment - but Rachel Roberts comes close to playing something of a central figure, and its someone we kind of dread seeing, but has a lot of dimension. She may be stern and even cruel up to a point (certain things she says to Sarah are shocking to see), but she has a job to do which is giving these girls an education and put them forward to the world, regardless of any of their, um, emotions or, heaven forbid, sexual tension (which is there, if you look kind of close enough). Though there are other people on the side, like the supporting male characters who keep going back to search the Rock due to guilt and some unspoken words, it's Roberts show a lot of the time and she makes it work on the human level to balance the visual poetry and grace.Yes, Picnic at Hanging Rock is often poetic, and only once in a while becomes a little too much or, borderline, dated in its attempts to make something larger than the real world into the mythic or other-worldly. There are no easy answers to what happens to these girls, but there doesn't need to be given how the story unfolds, who does what to whom, and seeing the decay of an institution come undone ever so simply by the worst that can happen - the 'not knowing' even being worse than finding them dead, for example.

Peter Weir's mystery drama Picnic At Hanging Rock is the very definition of haunting. It has an intangible, dreamlike atmosphere that is at once beautiful and eerie. Nothing quite like it has crossed my cinematic vision up until this point, and can't believe it took me this long to check it out. The setting s 1900, Australia, a land still very much wild and untamed, although partway colonized by the British. In the hypnotizing opening scene, several angelic young girls in a remote boarding school cast longing, lingering looks out the windows at the horizon, and lyrically recite verses of poetry in the early morning air. They are a naive young bunch, because of the times, and their age. They embark with some of their teachers for a picnic at a local landmark, a labyrinthine plateau called Hanging Rock. Four of the girls become curious in the warmth of the afternoon sun and venture into the maze of stone formations high up on the hill. Three of them are never seen again. The fourth is traumatized by a terror she can remember nothing of. It's a mystery that crawls up your spine and grips you with a need to know, yet left unrequited and empty as the unforgiving outback. Cinematographer Russell Boyd paints gauzy pictures worthy of renaissance art, and navigates the spooky rock formation until we think we see things, feel things, and are within the grasp of answers that the film remains obstinate in giving. He even laid bridal lace over the lens in some scenes to enhance the ethereal tone. A huge part of what makes the film work is the knockout pan flute score by Zhamfir that piles on the atmosphere. A classic of true originality and daring exploration.