Review of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) by Ajai K — 05 Feb 2011

This luminous, eerie film leaves you unsettled and with more questions than answers.

Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place in Australia at the turn of the 20th century. In honor of Valentine's Day, a group of girls from a boarding school are taken on a day trip to Hanging Rock--a sort of canyon-type rock formation. By the end of the day, three of the girls and one of their teachers has gone missing. One week later, one of the girls is found, but has no memory of what happened on the rock. The rest of the film deals with the aftermath of the incident and the attempts of the police to put together the puzzle of the missing girls. The authorities make assumptions (maybe the girls were abducted and molested?), but find evidence to discard those assumptions (the surviving girl is examined and found to be "quite intact", therefore not molested). At the end of the film, the audience is no closer to finding a conclusive answer than the police are. And this leaves the viewer with a sense of haunted unease.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a horror film of the mind. We see no bloodshed, violence, or supernatural beings. Instead, director Peter Weir allows us to formulate a solution to the mystery of the missing girls in our own minds--and often, what we can imagine is more horrifying than any sensible answer the director could leave us with.