Another movie review, 32 years late

"A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves."

I don't know if I've ever seen a movie that left as many loose ends dangling in the wind as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Of course, all those loose ends are the central part of the movie. If there weren't any loose ends, it would be a standard crime solving mystery film.

So, to backtrack, a little background, since I'm fairly sure that nobody who will read this has actually seen it. A group of girls and a pair of their teachers from a boarding school in Australia take a picnic on Valentine's Day, 1900, to Hanging Rock (a real-life volcanic formation). Three of the girls and one of the teachers go missing without a trace. A week later, one of the girls shows up with no memory at all of what happened.

From there it unfolds like a murder mystery, as pieces of the puzzle slowly come into the picture: a young Englishman and his Australian friend (who is an employee of the English family, who may be royalty or something) witnessed the girls shortly before they disappeared, another girl claims to have seen the teacher running up the hillside in her underwear shortly before she disappeared.

Except (and you can consider this a SPOILER ALERT, except that it's one of the central points of the movie, and thus not really a spoiler) at the end, nothing is explained. The girls are still missing, and nobody knows why. Several subplots come out of the woodwork (for instance, the Australian employee of the English family is clearly the long lost sister of the best friend of one of the missing boarding school girls), and they too are left unresolved.

So here's what I think.

For one thing, I don't think I've ever seen a movie filmed in such bright and crystal clear daylight that creeped me out so much. We are shown everything, yet left able to see nothing. An air of palpable dread and suspense hangs over even the most innocuous of settings, and the uncomfortable and stiff silence that penetrates most of the film makes it all the more unnerving when it is suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted by a hideous outburst. Just thinking about it sends chills down my spine.

Closely related to that is the portrayal of the way that Victorian England rubs uncomfortably against the Australian outback. The boarding school and the English family seem to exist in an awkward approximation of their native English habitat. The picnic is preceded by harsh warnings to the girls against any sort of exploration of the rock, and to look out for the apparent abundance of poisonous snakes and ants. In another scene, on the way to the picnic, the children are allowed to gleefully remove their gloves in a rare display of leniency (keep in mind that February in Australia is summer).

To me, that's the real theme of the movie (although it's a pretty buried subtext, if it was intentional at all): the girls' disappearance may be symbolic of the inability for the "civilized" English to deal with the harsh realities of Australia; it's a warning of the bad things that can happen when we step unprepared into the great unknown, into an environment that we don't control. And never has this theme carried more poignancy than it does today, as we, as a society and as a species, creep ever closer to completely eliminating that which is unknown or uncertain in nature. Indeed, today Hanging Rock is a tourist attraction, complete with a cafe at the base of the mountain.