Synopsis

“What we see and what we seem are but a dream—a dream within a dream.”

On St. Valentine’s Day 1900, at a strait-laced girls’ school picnic beneath the volcanic cliffs of Hanging Rock, three schoolgirls and their teacher wander through the profound wilderness and vanish in broad daylight. As they are exposed and drawn to nature’s ethereal transcendence, under the ancestral beauty and unsettling cosmic dread of Australia’s silent grandeur, their genteel social training and domestication unravel.

Adapted from Joan Lindsay's iconic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir’s early masterpiece renders the smothering societal stereotypes of the Victorian Era with soft earth tones, layered with sinister obscurity and hallucinatory cinematography, heralding the birth of the Australian New Wave. The ominous transience and ethereal aesthetic not only inspired designers such as Alexander McQueen and Raf Simons but have continued to linger in the work of Sofia Coppola and more, haunting the damsels in The Virgin Suicides and The Beguiled.