Film review: Picnic at Hanging Rock

This past year I have grown to love movies to an extend that one of my top visited webpages is imdb, and my "to-watch" list is just too long. Watching less anime and more movies and english-language series has been a weird transition also... 

Don´t worry though! I still watch anime, and I am still interested in it all, I just feel a personal growth over the past year, stemming from moving out on my own for the first time, I am sure haha ^^

I wanted to reccomend a nice movie for all of you to check out because sometimes you just need to watch a good movie that makes you feel calm and makes you think. Being it the nice aesthetics, music, scenery or just actors that attracted me to the movie in the first place differs very much from movie to movie. This one might be old, but I would definitely reccomend giving it a watch!

 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) 

 

I wanted to write about this movie because I am rather obsessed by the urban-legend storyline connected with it. It is about an all-girls boarding school in Victoria, Australia, called Applegate hall, and their picnic-outing on st. Valentines day in the year 1900 by the foot of a hill called Hanging Rock. The movie starts with the girls getting ready in the morning of the picnic, reading eachothers St. Valentines day letters and fawning over their muslin dresses. These scenes are truly beautiful. Once they leave the school ,in a chariot that carries all of them in one go, they chat merrily about their excursion all the way up to their destination place, which is the nearby hilled area known as Hanging Rock. There they eat cake, and toast for St. Valentine, and have a lovely time in the serene woodland scenery, with delightful classical music setting the perfect feeling. 

The teachers soon find out all their clocks have stopped, making it hard to find out when they need to go back again for the promised dinner in the evening, with the headmistress. Soon three of the senior girls decide to wander up to the hillside for some school-related research,  accompanied by one of the younger girls. They promise to only be gone for a short while. They begin feeling weird as they wander through the lower passages of the mountain side, and the youngest girl begins to feel frightend. Suddenly the three elder ones wander off into the mountain, leaving the youngest one behind, screaming. She runs away in share terror of their strange behaviour. And since then... the girls dissapear, never to be found again! 

 

 

 

 

This is a movie based on a novel that came out in 1967 (that I am currently reading!) written by the Australian author Joan Lindsay, who claims that it might either be reality or fiction. Since then there have been countless amounts of people researching the story, trying to find proof for the existence of the people involved, and the school in discussion. One thing is for certain, Hanging Rock has always been a mystical place that people seem to connect weird happenings to! 

The rest of the movie, after the dissaperance of the girls, is about the struggle of the people left behind and their suffering. The scenes are very dream-like and the music combined with the sceneries makes for a very delirious sort of feeling to it. No wonder this has been deemed perhaps the first popular cult-movie from Australia! A must see! 

I hope you enjoyed this entry,

please comment below!