Peter Weir’s 1975 film involves the students of an all-girls school going to Hanging Rock with a couple of teachers from the school. However, several girls and one of the teachers seemingly vanish into thin air.

Whilst there is a linear narrative running through Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is more a film that the viewer lets wash over them with startling imagery, and what is experienced by the characters becomes a similar experience for the viewer also.

Beautiful cinematography, costumes and the film’s highly individualised colour palate add up to one of the most unique viewing experiences I’ve ever experienced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.

The film presumes the viewer has a modicum of intelligence and leaves events open to the viewer’s own conclusions as to what is actually happening and what has caused it. The film does the same with the themes running through the film. The idea of time is one such theme with the film seemingly capturing events from an era in which time has stood still. In fact, in one scene in which a character asks what time it is, one pupil says that she has left the watch she normally wears back at school, whilst the teacher in attendance checks her pocket watch to find that it has stopped at 12 o’clock- time has literally stood still.

I picked up on a kind of simmering malevolence running through the movie which periodically erupts towards the end of the running time. Witness the girl who is found and what happens when she is taken to say goodbye to the rest of the girls and how this erupts into violence.

There is also a simmering sense of lesbianism that also periodically rears its head throughout the film. But, this is shown to be repressed more than it is overtly apparent.

The only bone of contention regarding the film is whether to watch the Criterion or Second Sight editions, both of which garnered glowing reviews. I watched the Criterion transfer for this review and it really is a thing of beauty.

An enigma wrapped in a mystery, a beautiful film like no other.

4.5 out of 5 stars