Picnic at Hanging Rock

A film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria. Read full review

A fascinating film that is by turns fascinating and mysterious. Read full review

It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil. Read full review

Weir builds atmosphere one detail and lingering shot at a time. The cluttered, shadowy interiors of the school contrast with the open spaces and welcoming light of Hanging Rock, but the film makes neither feel like a safe place. Every moment feels designed to be unsettling, but the film also creates a sense of inevitability, that whatever is happening can’t be avoided, and should perhaps be embraced. Read full review

Visually it probably is one of the most beautiful pix ever seen, with Aussie flora and fauna and wonderful blue skies. Everything has been carefully re-created with loving exactitude. Read full review

One of the most hauntingly beautiful mysteries ever created on film. Read full review

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. Read full review

Peter Weir made this unsettling, atmospheric film early in his career, and it is still one of his most successful projects to date. Read full review

The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy. Read full review

An exceedingly beautiful film, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK seems to aspire to be an existential thriller of some sort. At times the film seems to tread in BLACK NARCISSUS territory with its depiction of barely controlled sexual hysteria and its eccentric lyrical quality. It's all pretty overheated and underexplained but this arty, vague, and possibly supernatural movie lingers on in the memory. Read full review

It's an engrossing tale, and Weir's languid, sun-dappled images are at once seductive and unnerving. Yet there's something hollow at the core, an unearned sense of importance, a reliance on mere mood to suggest mytsical depths. Why does Weir - and why should the audience - so easily accept these vanished schoolgirls as adolescent oracles, some sort of pagan Cassandras? The symbolic burden of Hanging Rock inevitably suggests the use of the Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India," but the comparison only points up the shallowness of Weir's conception. His movie is stylish and entertaining, but what he is pushing as metaphysical profundity is closer to metaphysical mush. [5 March 1979, p.105]

Director Peter Weir struggles to create an atmosphere of mystical languor, dissolving his actors in blinding sunlight and filling his sound track with the faintly ominous rustles of nature. But the deenergized drama leads only to anticlimax, as Weir suggests much more than he shows and invites the audience to fill in the meanings. Read full review

In the final count, nothing is satisfactorily resolved because tensions remain unexplored, while the atmospherically beautiful images merely entice and divert. The result is little more than a discreetly artistic horror film. Read full review

At once emotionally sound and cinematically promising, this sort of obsession can degenerate into spooky nonsense unless it's handled with care. Weir's attraction to the mysterious seems authentic enough, but he's still not expert at rationalizing and sustaining psychological mystery stories. Both "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "The Last Wave" lack consummate strokes of manipulative artistry. They leave you hanging on the brink, but the drop isn't very deep. [14 March 1979, p.B1]

Purely visual cinema was accomplished successfully in "Days of Heaven," where there is no story line to speak of, but people and nature are made memorably vivid through the moving picture.Picnic at Hanging Rock is not up to that level visually, because it occasionally slips into the hair-color advertisement school of slow-motion beauty. But even the attempt is marred: Looking for game clues would spoil any painting, but having to look and not being able to find them is worse. [16 March 1979, p.18]