Picnic at Hanging Rock

Tedious 6-hour series based on the classic 1975 Australian film about a group of female students and a teacher who disappear at Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day in 1900. Everything in this series is wrong: the casting of Mrs. Appleyard, the behavior and attitudes of the girls, and the hideous and anachronistic music.

The added backstories to the various characters is obvious padding and distracts from the central mystery that gets sidelined by a bunch of soap opera hogwash about runaway wives, separated siblings, and vaguely gay and lesbian leanings. None of this claptrap has anything to do with the disappearances.

Natalie Dormer is miscast in the central role of of headmistress (Rachel Roberts starred in the original), and she plays the part much too broadly. We don't need to know all the particulars; all we need to know is that she is stern and mysterious. The only acting standout in the cast is James Hoare as Albert, and he is only tangentially connected to the mystery.

Then there's the modern PC casting of the half-black student enrolled in a white girls' finishing school in the Victorian Australian Outback in 1900. Ya right! A total of 3 directors worked on the 6 episodes, with at least two writers working on separate episodes. That's just a clue as to why this mess is so disjointed and lacking in any unified vision whatsoever.

Some excellent acting, fabulous camera work, great set scenes that capture the claustrophobic atmosphere of the school. The things that let this don't, we just don't like anybody and really don't care. The graphics and music jar with the action and prove to be a distraction often played on instruments not in keeping with the period. The settings are too crisp and too clean and the director is fixated with symmetry, this effect creates a feeling of style over substance. The inner emotional conflicts of the characters rarely surface and so we the viewer are detached. Overall I enjoyed it but was just not memorable.

People may not be aware that the novel PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is very short, just over 200 pages. It works ideally as a 2-hour film but to stretch it out into 6-hours results in a heavily padded and downright dull miniseries. In the first hour, the girls disappear and the filmmakers bungle this key scene. There's no set- up, no sense of dread, so the main focus of the entire project falls flat. And that's in the first hour! For the rest of the miniseries, the characters involved seem more concerned about the girl's school than Hanging Rock. We see the local community searching for the girls, but at the same time, backstories of pretty much every character are introduced. Episodes 3 and 4 add zero to the narrative and you can see the filmmakers are desperate to keep us engaged with some poorly staged jump scares: an animal nailed to the wall! A pile of maggots at one character's feet! But why? No explanation. This is a much harsher PICNIC than Peter Weir's classic film of 1975. At times, the miniseries comes across as LA RESIDENCIA (THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED), the 1970 shocker with Lili Palmer who stars as the headmistress of a nineteenth-century French boarding school for girls. Some girls are whipped, others are slapped...but it isn't until the 5th and 6th episodes that we're reminded girls went missing. Whatever happened to them? Parents come and remove their children from the school and there are more flashbacks and backstories. The women talk about being "free" but that's never explained either. The girls who vanish "take a vow"...to what end? Stretched to the breaking point to six hours, the miniseries tries to answer questions that are never asked and, worst of all, forgets that Hanging Rock is the center of the story, not the school house.

See Peter Weir's masterpiece or read the book! They're magical, haunting and classic. This on the other hand, isn't. Did filmmakers really forget how to make that dreamy look? It looks too crisp and clean for a dreamy, surreal tale of mystery...just sayin'. I love Dormer but I don't think she fit the character. I loved the costumes!

...not because the series was bad, although what I did see was incredibly bad, but because I could not get past the 1990's New Age soundtrack. Not only did it sound more like dinner music played in an desperately upscale restaurant, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story and was intrusive enough to take me right out of the show and start wondering what Kitaro is doing these days.