Picnic at Hanging Rock

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.