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Amazon.com essential video: Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, director Peter Weir's lyrical, enigmatic masterpiece is an imaginative tease. The setting is a proper turn-of-the century Australian boarding school for girls, a suffocating institution built on strict moral codes, repressed sexuality, and a subtle but enforced class structure. As the film opens, girls draped in immaculate white dress prepare for a picnic at the nearby volcanic formation, Hanging Rock, and Weir hangs an air of dark foreboding over the proceeding. "You'll have to love someone else, because I won't be here very long," says one virginal girl, Miranda, to her friend. Her words are prophetic: during the picnic, Miranda, along with two other girls and an uptight schoolmistress, vanish into the rocks. While a search party repeatedly returns to the rock to look for either the girls or the reasons for their disappearance, Weir leaves the mystery unsolved. Like Antonioni's L'Avventura, the vanishing is open to numerous interpretations--both rational and illusory--but Weir drops enough allegorical clues that it feels like a parable. He transforms the landscape and weather into menacing and eerie images; outlines of faces can be seen in the rocks, while the oppressive heat beating down on the picnic doubles as an atmospheric metaphor for the girls' unbearable social and sexual confinement. These images and other plot twists toward the end hint that this mysterious vanishing, on some level, was actually a form of spiritual escape--the only out, other than death, from the film's bleak, tightly structured community. Regardless of how you see it, though, this hypnotic puzzle remains the highlight of the '70s Australian New Wave. The DVD version presents the film in letterbox form. --Dave McCoy
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Artistic but boring!
I saw this film when it first came out. It was such a boring farce. I kept watching the film in the hope that it would make sense, but it never did. Don't waste your money.
Rating: - My Favorite Scary Movie of All-Time
I adore scary movies! As a writer, I don't think I can afford to shut myself off from any human emotion, including horror. I love the first HALLOWEEN. I love the first NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT scared the bejeebers out of me and hey, I even enjoyed SAW! Instead of slasher pics, my true favorites are psychological thrillers like THE OTHERS and THE INNOCENTS. Which may be why I think PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is the scariest movie ever made.
This 1975 Australian film from Peter Weir (who would later go on to make GALLIPOLI, WITNESS, DEAD POET'S SOCIETY and MASTER AND COMMANDER) is a lyrical, brooding masterpiece set at Appleyard College (an all-girls school) in 1900. When a group from the college sets out to celebrate Valentine's Day with a picnic jaunt to Hanging Rock--an ancient volcanic outcropping in Victoria--disaster ensues. While the other students are napping, four of the girls defy their teacher's instructions and set off to explore the interior of the rock. The next thing we know, one teacher and three of the girls have vanished into thin air.
Only one girl is found--hysterical and with no memory of what happened to the others. The disappearances send shockwaves of fear and suspicion through the community. The movie's cinematography is exquisite and Weir captured the dreamy quality of the film by actually filming parts of it through a bridal veil. Although the students drift about in white dresses plainly chosen to symbolize their purity, the movie is rife with repressed sexuality. In their darkest hearts, the girls seem to have more in common with the chaotic wildness of the Australian outback than the rigid propriety of their society, which makes it easier to believe that they may have gone willingly to their mysterious fate. Without shedding a single drop of blood, this movie continues to haunt me years after I first saw it.
Rating: - Another meditative outpouring of emotion from Weir
Peter Weir has directed some amazing and unique films--Cast Away, Truman Show, Dead Poets Society--and this one is another mesmerizing one to contemplate. Picnic at Hanging Rock is an engrossing true story that is still an unsolved mystery.
A group of young students at a female boarding school take a field trip to a scenic volcanic outcropping. This excursion turns disasterous as some students wander off and mysteriously vanish. A teacher goes after the trio and also disappears.
Now what makes this such a consuming mystery are the circumstances that surround this story. It happened on Valentines Day, Saturday the 14th. One student was found alive, with noticeable scratches on her hands and face. She couldn't remember anything. There was an extensive search with dogs but no bodies were ever found.
Superbly shot and executed, this movie really captures the subtle devastating effects this had on the school and town. Suspicion, sorrow, and hatred flare as the questions only envoke more questions.
*To my gore bros: This has no blood, gore, or nudity, so you might get a little bored. Good to watch with the girlfriend or family though. Or while chopping up dead bodies.
Rating: - A Haunting Period Mystery
"People don't just disappear; not without a good reason," muses one of the characters in Peter Weir's excellent film. Yet, it appears that one day while on an outing to Hanging Rock, three students and one teacher from Mrs. Appleyard's boarding school do exactly this. Of course, to the film's characters the disappearance seems truely bizarre and irrational; yet to the modern viewer it seems perfectly reasonable to want to escape from the rigid, repressive Victorian world the ladies inhabit - a world where dancing, sewing, and memorizing poetry are the only activities available to young ladies on the verge of womanhood. Indeed, the dream-like scenes of the ladies in their orderly school uniforms as they move through the chaotic and untamed beauty of Hanging Rock further serve as a contrast to the absurd and artificial culture they inhabit. Not a thriller or a suspense film in the traditional sense, "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is more of a mystery about how people cope with events they don't understand. Over the course of the film, we move from worrying and wondering about those who vanished, to sympathizing with those left behind. Peter Weir's direction is haunting and effective, and the acting performances are quite good all around. The film does have a few flaws however: the music is pretty dated by now and the pacing of some scenes does drag a little bit. Over all, this is a unique mystery/period film definitely worth viewing.
Rating: - A Flawed Gem
I am rather cross at Criterion Collection for not providing the scenes that have been deleted, subtitles, a director's commentary (especially in consideration of their prices), and also for leading some viewers down the garden path by suggesting that "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a horror film. Therefore, I have given four stars to what used to be a five-star film.
When I first saw this film years ago I was spellbound, and although I still find it compelling, some of its magic has dissipated, perhaps due to the ravages of time and poor conservation (in a film which has been beautifully restored in respect to quality of color). It is difficult to believe that this is the "director's cut," since many significant scenes--as noted by others--have disappeared (The one that I recall is of the math teacher rising as if in a trance and slowly following the path of the girls up the mountain, and into oblivion.).
Despite these flaws, "Picnic at Hanging Rock" still exerts a mesmerising fascination in its imagery: the young girls in white seem to have stepped out of a painting by John Singer Sargent into an Australian summer; the stunning landscape--not only the brooding rock of the title, but also the eucalypts, the serpent, the koalas, and kookaberras--suggests an atavistic menace in which anything might be possible. The plaintive piping of the pan flute and the melancholy slow movement of the Beethoven piano concerto also contribute a haunting atmosphere that is unforgettable.
Viewing "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is rather like looking into an Australian opal. Its almost kaleidoscopic shifts of sequence generate as many interpretations as there are viewers: to some it is a psychological coming of age film that portrays sexual repression and transgression; others see it in terms of myth, impressionism, allegory, and even magical realism. For those who want instant answers, "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which raises more questions than it answers, is none of these.
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