Part of Weekend Classics
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is set at the turn of the 20th century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day. New 4K DCP Restoration
“Peter Weir’s 1975 film epitomizes the idea of the quasi-supernatural ‘outback uncanny’ — the incongruity of a decorous settler civilization on what appears to be an alien planet…. [The film] has echoes of L’AVVENTURA and PSYCHO, two movies that create an existential void when a main character vanishes less than midway through. It is more genteel yet more erotically charged than either.” —J. Hoberman, New York TImes (Jan 29, 2025)
“A movie that creates a specific place in your mind; free of plot, lacking any final explanation, it exists as an experience. In a sense, the viewer is like the girls who went along on the picnic and returned safely: For us, as for them, the characters who disappeared remain always frozen in time, walking out of view, never to be seen again.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times