Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you've already met the ghost of Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether you realised it or not. Peter Weir's 1975 film, one of the most revered things Australian cinema has produced, is the clear ancestor of that sun-bleached, dread-in-daylight strain of folk horror, and I came to it expecting to be spellbound. I was not.
The premise could hardly be more evocative. On a blazing Valentine's Day in 1900, a party of schoolgirls picnics beneath an ancient volcanic rock, and several of them wander up into it and are simply never seen again. No explanation. No resolution. Just absence, hanging in the hot air like a bad dream you can't quite shake. That should be exactly my kind of thing, and I wanted it to be. But to my real surprise, I found the whole thing something of a slog.
Its influence is beyond dispute. You can draw a straight line from Weir's ambiguous, unresolved unease to Midsommar and to half the folk horror that has emerged in the decades since. The difference is that its descendants learned to wed that mood to genuine visual spectacle. Midsommar is hypnotic to look at. Picnic, for all that its ethereal photography is meant to be its calling card, never cast that spell over me. The images that are supposed to shimmer just sat there. Stripped of that visual pull, the ambiguity began to feel less like mystery and more like a film politely declining to commit to anything.
The rest of it didn't haul things back either. The pace is glacial in a way I could never quite sink into, the performances land somewhere between mannered and flat, and though it's nominally a period piece, the whole thing sits at an odd, airless remove that kept me at arm's length throughout. Nor is it frightening, whatever the horror reputation it has since accrued. It is, for want of a better word, just odd. Dreamy and evasive and, to me, curiously inert. At a certain point I caught myself eyeing that rock not in wonder, but in hope that something might finally happen.
I do want to be fair, because I can see what it's reaching for, and I'm aware I'm swimming against a powerful tide of admiration here. Plenty of viewers find Picnic genuinely haunting, and I wouldn't tell them they're wrong. A film can work on one person and leave another completely cold, and that's not always anyone's fault. I also think the talent behind it is real. This is, after all, the same Peter Weir who made something as warm and alive as Dead Poets Society, so the craft was never in question. It just never quite landed for me on the day.
There's also something worth noting about what this film meant for Australian cinema more broadly. It helped put the industry on the map internationally, and you can trace a line from the confidence it gave local filmmakers all the way through to Australian genre cinema's recent resurgence. That's a genuine legacy, and I respect it. But respecting a film's place in history and actually enjoying it are two different things, and I'd be doing nobody any favours by pretending otherwise.
A landmark I'm glad to have finally caught up with, then. Two and a half stars from me, and I'm in no rush to revisit it.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1975 | Watched: 2026-08-17
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Shudder · Shudder Amazon Channel
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Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · Criterion Channel · HBO Max
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