Peter Weir’s eerie and lugubrious mystery chiller from 1975, adapted by screenwriter Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsay, is now rereleased for its 50th anniversary. It’s a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria: the bizarre and unclassifiable story of three demure and porcelain-white schoolgirls and one teacher who on Valentine’s Day 1900 – with the 19th century over and the Victorian age less than a year to run – simply vanish in the burning sun while on a picnic excursion to the forbiddingly vast monolith Hanging Rock in southern Australia. No one here uses the Indigenous name Ngannelong and the only Indigenous character is a tracker.
They disappear while exploring its rugged forms and inlets, which weirdly resemble the faces of Easter Island statues. Like the Marabar Caves in Forster’s A Passage to India, Hanging Rock is the centre of some unknowable enigma, almost audibly humming or throbbing with insects, a phenomenon that resists being subdued by the outsider’s rational law.
