Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir’s, now classic, 1975 film must surely be considered one of the greatest examples of creating a beautifully eerie and unsettling atmosphere in the history of cinema. The film unfolds like a feverish dream, calm and surreally beautiful yet also subtly frightening, it’s sinister undertones always present but hidden- we can feel from the very beginning that something worrying is about to happen but can’t quite place what it is.

The plot of the film itself is deceptively simple. It is Valentines Day in 1900, and a group of girls from a British boarding school in Australia are preparing for an excursion to Hanging Rock. We witness the girls as they lace their corsets, swap valentines cards and idly gossip, the heat stifling and omnipresent. There is tension and an uncomfortable sense that something is being repressed amongst these young women, of something unspoken yet pervasively powerful. This suggestion can be perfectly applied to Hanging Rock itself, an ancient, almost phallic structure, providing a rift in the heat- scorched wilderness surrounding it. The girls have been forbidden from exploring the rock, and instead picnic and sleep in its intimidating shadow. Eventually a group of them venture to climb the rock as if entranced, and three of them disappear within its primeval crevices. One later returns with no memory of what happened and the remaining two are never seen again.

 The remainder of the film revolves around the empty and unsettled atmosphere that permeates the lives of those left behind as they attempt to come to terms with what happened and await an eventual explanation that may never come. The films soundtrack blends perfectly with its surreal quality; the echoing pan flutes in the beginning seem to lull the audience into a serene complacency. So when the plot begins to unfold into something more akin to a nightmare, it is impossible to fully trust our perception of what happened anymore than the unfortunate characters that become caught up in such a bizarre mystery. Cinematically the film is beautiful to look at as well as unnerving at times and there is often a dream-like haze to the shots, constantly reminding us of the stifling heat. The scenery of native, aboriginal Australia is captured in a way that is majestic yet blank and faceless, as if it is withholding a secret from those that try to gaze into it.

 There were and still are, many movie goers who convinced themselves that the film and original novel, were based on true events although there has never been any record of such a thing occurring at hanging rock and the author eventually confirmed that it was indeed nothing more than a piece of fiction. However, despite its fictionality and possible supernatural undertones, the film’s ambiguous ending and lack of closure is certainly more akin to reality than it is to celluloid. As the film ends we have not been offered a true explanation as to what happened to the girls and have to deal with the unsettling thought that they may still be out there somewhere, swallowed up in nature’s dwarfing power, never to be found. In reality there are not always solutions to such mysteries, life is full of ambiguity and uncertainty and most often the truth remains horribly elusive. It is precisely this that makes Picnic at hanging rock such a continuously troubling and haunting film.