Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a filmmaker showing off. And why not? The man knows how to conjure dread from thin air.

It’s Valentine’s Day, 1900. A group of Australian schoolgirls ventures to Hanging Rock for a picnic. Three girls and a teacher vanish without a trace. We never learn what happened to them.

Weir starts with Friedkin-style documentary realism—handheld cameras, natural light, that sense of just-being-there authenticity. Then he pivots. The disappearance sequence is pure fever dream: cross-fades, superimpositions, insects in extreme close-up. The pan flute gives way to choral synths and deep bass that could score a Fulci horror film. It’s Twin Peaks before Twin Peaks, atmosphere and mystery as narrative.

The technical achievement is undeniable. Weir can make sunlight feel sinister. The score veers from pastoral to menacing without warning. (Though that theremin-like whine in later scenes felt like a bridge too far.) His director’s cut wisely trims seven minutes of fat.

But strip away the mood, and what remains? A handsomely mounted enigma that mistakes ambiguity for profundity.

The film gestures at big themes—Victorian repression, colonialism, female sexuality. The girls remove their shoes and stockings before disappearing, all loaded symbolism. The sole survivor faces her classmates’ accusations in a nightmare sequence of screaming faces and Dutch angles. Victim-shaming? Survivor’s guilt? The film won’t commit.

Lynch worked in pure dream logic and made no apologies.¹ This film wants to be meaningful without doing the hard work of meaning something. It piles up symbols like kindling but never strikes the match.

Without the mystery, you’re left with a teen melodrama in corsets. The performances are stiff. The plotting is reductive. One girl embodies repression, another embodies freedom. You’ve seen it before. I don’t need to know what happened on that rock. I need to know why Weir is telling this story. He never answers.

Still, watching Weir transform a sunny afternoon into existential horror is worth the price of admission. The emperor has no clothes, sure. But he’s got style.