- Search:
- Time Out worldwide
- Web

Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Director: Peter Weir

Average user rating

1 review

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Three girls and a teacher from an exclusive Australian academy unaccountably vanish while visiting a local beauty spot. Set in the Indian summer of the Victorian era, the film is dominated in turns by vague feelings of unease, barely controlled sexual hysteria, and a swooning lyricism. As for the mystery, we're left to conclude that it can only be explained in terms beyond human understanding. As such, the film is rooted in a tradition of sci-fi and horror cinema, depicting the school as a privileged elite, gradually contaminated and destroyed from within by its inability to understand the mystery which confronts it. But 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.

Author: CPe

Time Out Film Guide

Email Tweet Share

User reviews of this film

david said...

Posted on Aug 27 2008 12:19 "little more than a discreetly artistic horror film."... er yeah, is that all? Don't forget to mention budding teen sexuality, repression, sadism and suicide. Watched the Directors cut last night and was totally freaked out. 2001 meets St.Trinians 1900?This is beautifully composed, every shot as tightly constrained as those corsets the girls are forever slipping in and out of. Yes, its baffling and preposterous, but wow its great. Don't ask why, just watch it. That Peter Weir has a great future behind him.

Report as inappropriate