Picnic at Hanging Rock

"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"

I was first introduced to the film Picnic at Hanging Rock through my mother, who had found it on TV one day. As we watched it together, there was something about it that stuck with me for days after it. It has a certain haunting quality that one wouldn't expect from a film with such a benign title, but it took me a while to shake it. I've found it still has the same effect each time I've revisited it as well.

The premise is rather straight forward. A group of young women go on a picnic, along with one of their teachers Miss McCraw (played by Vivian Gray), to a natural geographic formation known as Hanging Rock on Feburary 14th, 1900. At the picnic, four of the girls, Miranda (played by Anne-Louise Lambert), Marion (played by Jane Vallis), Irma (played by Karen Robson) and Edith (played by Christine Schuler) start exploring Hanging Rock. They are observed by a young Englishman, Michael (played by Dominic Guard) and his valet Albert (played by John Jarratt) as the group ascends up the formation. Three of the girls, Miranda, Marion, and Irma, as well as Miss McCraw (who went up to collect them) vanish without a trace while Edith descends back down the formation, screaming. 

Numerous searches are launched, but no trace of the girls or the teacher is found. The Headmistress Mrs. Appleyard finds herself with the unenviable task of keeping order among the remaining girls while dealing with the fact that several parents are removing their daughters from the school after hearing of the events at Hanging Rock. The loss of those tuition dollars may mean the school will not be able to remain open. The police question the people that were there, but there are no clues or leads to be found. The girls simply vanished.

Meanwhile, Michael has a growing obsession with finding out what happened to them and admits to having nightmares about them. He finally decides to return to Hanging Rock to search himself, accompanied by Albert. What Michael finds after spending the night there shakes him to his very core. 

What makes this film so compelling to me is that there is no real resolution to the story. We never get a straightforward explanation as to what happened to the girls. There are enough clues and hints sprinkled through the film for the audience to draw their own conclusions and let their own imaginations fill in the missing pieces. It's strongly implied that there is a supernatural cause behind it for sure, but what exactly is for the audience to decide. So, depending on how active one's imagination is, what you take from seeing it could be very different from someone else's. 

But the film is not so much about the solution to the mystery as how does one move on after encountering an event that they will likely never know the entire truth of. It focuses on each of the people who walked away from that event as well as the public itself. How do they process it? Who is to blame? The teachers? The headmistress? And how do they move on knowing only that they will never know? For me, that makes the film all the more intriguing than getting a concrete solution and also all the more haunting too. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock is available on an impressive Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection and also available to view on their channel on Hulu Plus.