Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir made this unsettling, atmospheric film early in his career, and it is still one of his most successful projects to date.

One of the most hauntingly beautiful mysteries ever created on film.

It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.

A film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria.

An exceedingly beautiful film, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK seems to aspire to be an existential thriller of some sort. At times the film seems to tread in BLACK NARCISSUS territory with its depiction of barely controlled sexual hysteria and its eccentric lyrical quality. It's all pretty overheated and underexplained but this arty, vague, and possibly supernatural movie lingers on in the memory.

At once emotionally sound and cinematically promising, this sort of obsession can degenerate into spooky nonsense unless it's handled with care. Weir's attraction to the mysterious seems authentic enough, but he's still not expert at rationalizing and sustaining psychological mystery stories. Both "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "The Last Wave" lack consummate strokes of manipulative artistry. They leave you hanging on the brink, but the drop isn't very deep. [14 March 1979, p.B1]

Director Peter Weir struggles to create an atmosphere of mystical languor, dissolving his actors in blinding sunlight and filling his sound track with the faintly ominous rustles of nature. But the deenergized drama leads only to anticlimax, as Weir suggests much more than he shows and invites the audience to fill in the meanings.

From what I read about this film when it was released, a lot of people had trouble accepting its lack of resolution. After all, it's not always pleasant to be left with questions when an enigma is interesting, and many times I would have agreed with those opinions, but I think that Picnic at Hanging Rock would have lost much of its essence and especially its cult if it had been of that way. The film is deliberately constructed that way. the notorious lack of conclusion and answers are what make this film better because if the mystery were more conclusive, I doubt that it would measure up to the puzzle, because if the answers were rational, it would take away much of the charm and if the answers were supernatural, maybe it would turn it into a different film, therefore the mystery works better and what you form in your mind will

I know it is the seminal Aussie movie (to me that is Mad max or Crocodile Dundee) and I know it is a great example of Impressionism through an Aussie lens. But, I don't get it, even after reading reviews of how great it is. Maybe because the character development is so sparse and the plot so thin, this is just inaccessible to me. I love all of peter Weir's other works (Fearless, Truman Show and Master and Commander especially), but when watching this I cannot absorb it. i give it a 7 for being an Impressionist painting in motion.