Picnic at Hanging Rock

1975, Peter Weir, Australia

Content Note: Suicide theme

“All that we see, and all that we seem, is but a dream: a dream within a dream”

On a hot, languid day in February 1900, in the bush near Mt Macedon,Victoria, a group of schoolgirls idle drowsily on a picnic to celebrate St Valentine’s Day. They lie in the shadow of the looming, prehistoric monolith Hanging Rock. Venturing into the bush and ascending the Rock, three schoolgirls and their governess vanish without a trace. 

Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is an evocative, haunting meditation on desire, longing, and the anxiety of settlement. The pull of the unknown, uncontain-able “something” of Hanging Rock resists the class, gender and rigid Victorian structures imposed on the Australian landscape. Throughout the film it almost appears to bristle or pulsate as the ripples of the disappearances begin to take effect. 

These incongruous elements contrast to create a slippage and dislocation that eventually dissolves into horror as the narrative progresses. From the first eerie peals of the pan-pipes that mark the film’s musical theme, Picnic at Hanging Rock leaves audiences destabilised, but drawn – as Miranda, Irma Marion and Miss McCraw were – to the mystery at the heart of Hanging Rock.

“This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowy indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film’s genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme.” — Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine