Australian master filmmaker Peter Weir might be retired, sadly, but he amazing and eclectic work always lives on. Weir has so many great works under his belt, the sea-faring “Master & Commander,” the epic “Gallipoli,” thrillers like “The Mosquito Coast” and “Witness” with Harrison Ford and then perhaps more mainstream works like “The Truman Show” and “Dead Poets Society.” But his earlier pre-Hollywood work is arguably still his best, often very mysterious, enigmatic, eerie and mesmerizing. Take 1975’s “Picnic At Hanging Rock,” which could be best described as what if Sofia Coppola made a film in the 70s, twenty years before she started making movies, but with maybe a more surreal and unknowable touch.
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Starring Aussie actors Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Vivean Gray and a young, pre-fame Jacki Weaver (“Animal Kingdom”), “Picnic At Hanging Rock” centers around disappearance of several boarding school girls and their teacher during a picnic at Hanging Rock, Victoria on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and the subsequent effect on the local community.
“Picnic At Hanging Rock” is haunting and elusive, a dreamy, meditative and very alluring film, honestly, it might be Weir’s best film. Already out on the Criterion Collection for several years now, Criterion’s adjacent sister company Janus Film is re-releasing the film in a 4K release at the end of January.
Here’s the official synopsis:
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all- female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.
“Picnic At Hanging Rock” opens January 31 in New York at the IFC Center. It’s truly a stone-cold classic, so if you haven’t ever seen it, now is the perfect time to catch up with it. Watch the new 4K restoration trailer below:
