Picnic at Hanging Rock 4K 1975 DC

A group of schoolgirls goes on a picnic, and some of them disappear without a trace.

And before and after that, paranoid delirium.

The most memorable phrase in the film is the words at the beginning of the film, "What we see and what they see in us is only a dream and a dream within another dream," which, by the way, belong neither to screenwriter Cliff Greene nor to author Joan Lindsey, whose work was adapted. It is a phrase of the great mystic Edgar Allan Poe, of whom this picture is a shameless parody.

The first natural question that interests every viewer who has not seen the film is, "What is the film about?" For me personally, the question remains open, for my version is "Nothing." We are hooked by the Australian debutant (let's consider, even if he had one film before) Weir, who years later will shoot "Dead Poets Society" and "The Truman Show", and meanwhile he is still very green and experiments on all sorts of details: on the actors' acting, asking them not to blink in the frame, on the shooting techniques, speeding up the number of frames per second, etc. In short, Peter practiced and decided to show it all to a worldwide audience at the same time. And as at that time there wasn't Internet and youtube yet, he decided to fabricate footage at once under the label of a movie and provide it to the wide screen.

Generally speaking, mysticism does not, a priori, provide answers to the questions posed, but it does provide some clues and gives the viewer the opportunity to finish the story on his own. In this respect, "Picnic..." - is an utterly sadistic film that, after two hours of viewing, points a long index finger (or maybe another) at you and cackles snidely, celebrating the killing of valuable time that could have been spent on worthwhile pages of good writing or on something else useful.

Speaking of the main components of the film, it is impossible not to note the absolutely miserable acting, the wooden changes of facial expressions, the false emotions, the inappropriate and inappropriate to the pace and the atmosphere of the picture music. Naturally, the course of events is also perplexing, with everything from the "I don't know why and why" series. The sense of disconnectedness does not leave you throughout the film. Maybe the inconsistency and even a peculiarly chaotic way of running the story keeps the atmosphere of mysticism in the film, but purely visually it has no effect, and the intrigue is caused by a banal desire to find an answer to a question, which increases due to the short running time.

Simply put, it is believed that if a film has been able to evoke conflicting feelings, resentment or rapture, if it has been able to keep the audience chained to their seats until the closing credits, and if it is still talked about long afterwards, then there is certainly merit and dignity in the film. It does, in part. I won't recommend the film for viewing, but I won't discourage it either. I think this is one of those cases where everyone has to decide for himself which side of the river he will be on. Except that I'm afraid the river will dry up over time.