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Desire as persistent and intense as the sunshine on a bright summer day is what teases out madness in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. The objects, or goals, of these desires are disparate, though they all spiral out following the 1900 disappearance of three young women and a teacher from the Appleyard School during a trip to the small titular ridge on St. Valentine’s Day. The vanishing of these women is central to the plot, but Weir’s film is never as fascinated with the reasons for this absence as it is with the characters left in its inexplicable wake. Cliff Green’s script, adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel of the same name, never goes about teasing what could have happened to these women at Hanging Rock, instead focusing on the wild cupidity that erupts in the surrounding community in reaction to the mystery.

For many of the characters,...

Welcome to the first "meeting" of the RopeofSilicon Movie Club. The film being discussed is Peter Weir's eerie 1979 feature Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film easily described as a mystery and often referred to as a horror. I had hoped to keep my own thoughts to a reasonable length, but the film got the better of me. Feel free to read my thoughts or simply delve into the conversation in the comments below. This is a free for all discussion were thoughts and opinions are allowed to run free... Please do so... Picnic at Hanging Rock is an adaptation of Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel of the same name and is easily summarized, but not explained, by the film's opening text: On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of...