Entertainment Weekly - 10/23/1998
"...[It] wears the brilliant obscurity of a Dickinson poem and the suggestive force of a Magritte painting....[Offers] just the perfect beauty of its puzzle..." -- Rating: A
New York Times - 02/23/1979
"...A hypnotic spell....A movie that is both spooky and sexy."
Los Angeles Times - 06/25/1998
"...Exquisite and seductive....Cinema at its most evocative....PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK remains a gorgeous-looking, superbly wrought cinema..."
Total Film - 08/01/2003
"...Swaddling the story in an atmosphere of eerie mysticism, Weir shuts out logic and reason in favour of cloaking the tale in swooning mysticism..."
Sight and Sound - 08/01/2008
"[A] mysterious, subtle and beautifully shot film....IT is also eerie and unsettling, its dreamlike quality heightened by the haunting music..."
Empire - 08/01/2010 5 stars out of 5 -- "Weir piles on lyrical image after lyrical image, wallowing in different moods to build something eerie, beautiful and dripping with dread."
Product Description:
When a group of schoolgirls from an elite Victorian finishing school embark on a Valentine's day excursion to an unusual outcropping of volcanic rock, four members of the party are drawn towards the summit, where they experience powerful forces of time, nature, and eroticism, and vanish into thin air. This meticulously crafted Australian film displays a remarkable sense of eerie foreboding and lush surrealist sensibility, which have earned it a rabid cult following.
Plot Synopsis:
Weir's (TRUMAN SHOW, DEAD POETS SOCIETY) exotic story employs tranquil surrealism and lush cinematography to explore the interconnected relationships between nature, eroticism and repression. While out climbing rocks, three girls from a posh finishing school vanish without a trace. In an attempt to find them, a geometry teacher climbs the rock and follows them into oblivion. A young man who has seen the teacher running up the mountain in a pair of bloomers, decides to spend the night on the rock, in hopes of finding the girls. But in the morning he is discovered with a wound on his head and no recollection of what happened. And when one of the girls later returns she's also wounded and dazed. A truly alluring, enigmatic film.
Film Collectors & Archivists: Alpha Video is actively looking for rare and
unusual pre-1943 motion pictures, in good condition, from Monogram, PRC,
Tiffany, Chesterfield, and other independent studios for release on DVD. We
are also interested in TV shows from the early 1950s. Share your passion
for films with a large audience.
Let us know what you have.