‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ Is A Diverse, Campy Circus That Sets Itself Apart From The 1975 Film [Review]

After canceling a swath of outré, female-centered shows to focus on high-budget fantasy epics, Amazon Prime has picked up…another outré, female-centered show. And they’re all the better for it! FremantleMedia’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” miniseries, starring Natalie Dormer, is an awesomely eclectic adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel that sets itself apart from Peter Weir’s classic 1975 film. The series’ greatest strength is its unparalleled ability to sniff out subtext, as directors Larysa Kondracki, Amanda Brotchie, and Michael Rymer twist this low-budget epic into an eye-popping, surreal mystery with complex characters and consummate camp.

“Picnic at Hanging Rock” is a six-part story about a conniving widow, Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer), and her teen girl charges at Appleyard College for Young Ladies in turn-of-the-century Australia. When three such charges; Miranda Reid (Lily Sullivan), Irma Leopold (Samara Weaving), and Marion Quade (Madeleine Madden, an actual Aboriginal actress!); and a teacher, Greta McCraw (Anna McGahan), go missing during an outing, reality and time blur as the mystery rocks the tiny, colonial town. Hester becomes paranoid that the college’s newfound notoriety will alert everyone to her duplicitous past, and flashbacks to the girls’ friendship at the school uncover the mystery of their disappearance as Hester’s secrets likewise become clear.

The narrative is overtly about time – its bendiness and impermanence – but it’s more subtly about marginalization. Three prominent characters get gay subplots built upon realistic foundations of confusion and desire, Hester’s foremost demon is her adolescent trauma, and Marion is constantly grappling with the social limitations of her Aboriginal ancestry. The missing girls, along with their young friend Sara (a lovable Inez Curro), all fight against the strictures of “proper ladyhood” in one way or another – Miranda and Sara enact this most literally as tomboys of a feather. Though the show relies on slippery motifs, its characters feel grounded in reality. Not because they are necessarily realistic themselves (on the contrary, they’re often satirically melodramatic), but because their struggles are the same as modern people embroiled in racist, patriarchal culture.

The show’s other greatest strength is its willingness to lean into camp. Where the Weir film took its surreal source material quite seriously, adapting it into a dramatic art film, this “Picnic at Hanging Rock” embraces both hilarity and artistry. Yael Stone of “Orange is the New Black” fame is barely recognizable as the dowdy Dora Lumley, an Appleyard teacher more dedicated to Jesus than she is to common sense, and she plays the part to comedic perfection. Natalie Dormer is in her sensuously sinister prime as Hester: Though her character occasionally slips into one-dimensional antagonism, Dormer is clearly having the time of her life playing a cat-and-mouse game with viewers.

The set reflects a similarly delicious tension between the comedic and dour. The décor and costumes (by the brilliant Josephine Ford and Edie Kurzer, respectively) evoke a modern-yet-Victorian sensibility akin to Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” – special shout-out to Hester’s on-trend tiny sunglasses. The film’s $3 million budget is apparent at certain points: Green-screened exterior shots poke through, and footage gets rehashed along the way, but these things ultimately work because the show does them unabashedly and intentionally. Everything is done in the service of surrealism, and it’s done well. Would-be hokey dream sequences and spooky-story choruses are just self-aware enough to suck you in without ruining the fun. It’s that tenuous balance that defines really good camp – nothing is clean-cut or normative, but would you really want it to be?

If there’s one major flaw in “Picnic,” it’s that it doesn’t push far enough into all of its characters’ rich backstories. We catch glimpses of them, but the characters themselves are often hard to pin down. One gay romance is quite explicit, while the other two are far more subtextual, and Marion’s race is not addressed enough. Still, the show is trying to do a lot, and the end result is a truly exquisite mess, full of twists and turns and laughs and head-scratching. “Picnic at Hanging Rock” might not be for everyone, intentionally haywire as it is, but if you’re not even a little intrigued after Episode 1, I have bad news for you – you’re boring. [A-]