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Picnic at Hanging Rock

  • 1975
  • PG
  • 1h 55m
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
39K
YOUR RATING
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Trailer for Picnic At Hanging Rock
Play trailer4:49
3 Videos
99+ Photos
DramaMystery

During a rural summer picnic, a few students and a teacher from an Australian girls' school vanish without a trace. Their absence frustrates and haunts the people left behind.During a rural summer picnic, a few students and a teacher from an Australian girls' school vanish without a trace. Their absence frustrates and haunts the people left behind.During a rural summer picnic, a few students and a teacher from an Australian girls' school vanish without a trace. Their absence frustrates and haunts the people left behind.

  • Director
    • Peter Weir
  • Writers
    • Joan Lindsay
    • Cliff Green
  • Stars
    • Rachel Roberts
    • Anne-Louise Lambert
    • Vivean Gray
  • See production, box office & company info
  • IMDb RATING
    7.4/10
    39K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Peter Weir
    • Writers
      • Joan Lindsay
      • Cliff Green
    • Stars
      • Rachel Roberts
      • Anne-Louise Lambert
      • Vivean Gray
    • 273User reviews
    • 165Critic reviews
    • 81Metascore
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Won 1 BAFTA Award
      • 4 wins & 11 nominations total

    Videos3

    Picnic At Hanging Rock
    Trailer 4:49
    Watch Picnic At Hanging Rock
    Picnic At Hanging Rock: The Picnic
    Clip 4:50
    Watch Picnic At Hanging Rock: The Picnic
    Picnic At Hanging Rock: Interview With Peter Weir
    Featurette 3:43
    Watch Picnic At Hanging Rock: Interview With Peter Weir

    Photos126

    Anne-Louise Lambert, Karen Robson, Christine Schuler, and Jane Vallis in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Anne-Louise Lambert, Karen Robson, and Jane Vallis in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
    Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Rachel Roberts
    Rachel Roberts
    • Mrs. Appleyard
    Anne-Louise Lambert
    Anne-Louise Lambert
    • Miranda St Clare
    • (as Anne Lambert)
    Vivean Gray
    • Miss Greta McCraw
    Helen Morse
    Helen Morse
    • Mlle. de Poitiers
    Kirsty Child
    • Miss Lumley
    Tony Llewellyn-Jones
    Tony Llewellyn-Jones
    • Tom
    • (as Anthony Llewellyn-Jones)
    Jacki Weaver
    Jacki Weaver
    • Minnie
    Frank Gunnell
    • Mr. Whitehead
    Karen Robson
    Karen Robson
    • Irma
    Jane Vallis
    Jane Vallis
    • Marion Quade
    Christine Schuler
    Christine Schuler
    • Edith
    Margaret Nelson
    • Sara Waybourne
    Ingrid Mason
    • Rosamund
    Jenny Lovell
    Jenny Lovell
    • Blanche
    Janet Murray
    • Juliana
    Vivienne Graves
    • Pupil
    Angela Bencini
    • Pupil
    Melinda Cardwell
    • Pupil
    • Director
      • Peter Weir
    • Writers
      • Joan Lindsay
      • Cliff Green
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Executive producer Patricia Lovell admits to being genuinely afraid of Hanging Rock. In an interview, she explained that she has only gone back to Hanging Rock once since the shooting. It was 10 years later in 1985 and Lovell said she got so frightened at the location she left almost immediately. She refuses to go back to this day.
    • Goofs
      The movie takes place in February 1900, 11 months before the Australian colonies federated and 11 years before the creation of the Australian Capital Territory within New South Wales. When Mrs Appleyard addresses the gathered pupils to communicate the merciful deliverance of their classmate Irma, the NSW map behind nearby Miss Lumley clearly shows the existence of the ACT (defined in red).
    • Quotes

      [first lines]

      Miranda: What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.

    • Alternate versions
      The Director's Cut released in 1998 (available on Criterion DVD) is seven minutes shorter than the original version.
    • Connections
      Edited into Picnic at Wolf Creek (2006)
    • Soundtracks
      Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 2nd Movement
      Written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

    User reviews273

    Review
    Review
    Featured review
    If you're up for a free-form dramatization of the word 'unease'...
    I remember reading (God knows where) someone's shaggy-dog story about this film. Apparently, this individual had a friend (as people who tell these kind of stories tend to) who went to see 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' sometime in the mid 1970s. He was late, there was the inevitable confusion, and he consequently spent the next two hours whimpering in fear - waiting for the chainsaw-wielding assassin to appear and rip into a bunch of immaculately attired Edwardian schoolgirls.

    This is probably as good an analogy as any for the sense of dread this film (fitfully) manages to accumulate. Watching it is like seeing weather systems build. Small increments appear, converge on other increments, circling each other ambiguously before merging into a grey, baleful mass that sits there on the horizon, making atmospheric noises. In 'Picnic...' the wind moves plangently through eucalypts, clocks tick, an orphan girl is the victim of snobbish behaviour, girls gossip, more clocks tick, the wind moves through more eucalypts, the clocks stop, something 'unspeakably eerie' happens, and that's pretty much it.

    Ultimately, the film is about Peter Weir placing markers of European culture - corsets, watches, a locally built replica of an Eighteenth century English manor - in the vast, contoured, deeply ambivalent Australian hinterland, and letting his camera record the absurdity of those spatial relationships. His early twentieth century Australians anxiously encircle themselves with the accoutrements of civilization they've brought with them - its dress codes, its class politics, its architectural styles - as if shielding their bodies from the unfamiliar landscape outside. Yet their attempts to maintain a European identity by 'keeping up appearances' come off as merely obsessional.

    The elaborate dresses the girls wear, the formalities observed at the picnic (and at a surreal dinner party set on a flat, sunblasted lake edge - a Seurat painting gone horribly wrong), far from being emblems that mark a cultural continuity unifying Australia with Europe, seem oddly fetishistic - deeply arbitrary. Weir's characters seem to sense this meaninglessness also; they're enervated, without conviction. They seem to realize that, in bearing items of European material culture within this new environment, they're merely in possession of a bunch of dead letters - signifiers rendered powerless (decontextualized) by distance. As more than one character remarks, 'it all looks different here'.

    To add to the unease, Weir intercuts all this with shots of the landscape - huge, forested, confrontationally empty. There's a sense of something staring back, unimpressed, 'personified' by the oddly biomorphic shapes within Hanging Rock itself.

    One can still feel the reverberations, twenty five years on. There are definite echoes of 'Picnic...' in 'The Piano', 'The Virgin Suicides', and the whole slew of films that erstwhile Antipodean Sam Neill rather dodgily categorises the 'Cinema of Unease'. If you really want to freak yourself out, try watching this and 'The Quiet Earth' in the same sitting. You may never feel absolute faith in your ties to the physical universe again.
    helpful•91
    25
    • Cloten
    • Sep 14, 2001

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    FAQ8

    • What is 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' about?
    • Is 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' based on a book?
    • Is 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' based on a true story?

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • October 31, 1976 (United Kingdom)
    • Country of origin
      • Australia
    • Official sites
      • Criterion Collection (United States)
      • Criterion Forum 2 [United States]
    • Languages
      • English
      • French
    • Also known as
      • Pique-nique à Hanging Rock
    • Filming locations
      • Mount Diogenes, Hanging Rock Reserve, Woodend, Victoria, Australia(Hanging Rock)
    • Production companies
      • British Empire Films Australia
      • The South Australian Film Corporation
      • The Australian Film Commission
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Budget
      • A$440,000 (estimated)
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $49,582
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $27,492
      • Jun 28, 1998
    • Gross worldwide
      • $82,361
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Technical specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 55 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.66 : 1

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