Description: Twenty years after it swept Australia into the international film spotlight, Peter Weir's stunning 1975 masterpiece remains as ineffable as the unanswerable mystery at its core. A Valentine's Day picnic at an ancient volcanic outcropping turns to disaster for the residents of Mrs. Appleyard's school when a few young girls inexplicably vanish on Hanging Rock. A lyrical, meditative film charged with suppressed longings, Picnic at Hanging Rock is at long last available in a pristine widescreen director's cut with a newly-minted Dolby® digital 5.1 channel soundtrack.
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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More
- Artistic but boring!
- My Favorite Scary Movie of All-Time