Based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is both a mystery on the scale of geological time and the product of a specific moment in the flowering of Australian cinema in the 1970s. 

Australia’s New Wave combined historical drama, Gothic horror and a new appreciation of the country’s physical and social complexity in films as varied as Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), George Miller’s Mad Max and Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (both 1979), but it unquestionably reached a peak in this entirely fictional tale of a group of schoolgirls who disappear on a trip to an extinct volcano: a real location in Victoria, often used for rock concerts.

The sensual and troubling atmosphere that Weir skillfully evokes has proved a lasting influence not only on other filmmakers but on forms as diverse as fashion photography and music videos. The film’s sense of languor and mystery is helped by a soundtrack that includes both classical music and the haunting airs of Romanian pan-pipes. 

“We worked very hard,” Weir told an interviewer for Sight & Sound, “at creating an hallucinatory, mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions.”

“Peter Weir’s eerie and lugubrious mystery chiller from 1975, adapted by screenwriter Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsay, is now rereleased for its 50th anniversary. It’s a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria”. Peter Bradshaw, Guardian (2025)