Picnic at Hanging Rock

It’s Valentine Day in 1900 and the girls of Appleyard College are on a day trip to Hanging Rock. During the coach ride there, their teacher Miss McCraw remarks that the volcanic rock formation in the middle of the Australian outback is only a million years old, still youthful in geological terms. Upon their arrival, a different temporality does indeed seem to apply, as watches stop ticking and everyone falls asleep, except for the four girls and Miss McCraw, who climb the rock as if in a trance and disappear without trace. As the boarding school and local community hysterically search for explanations that will never arrive, the rock continues to watch over the landscape, just as it has done for millennia: impassive, indifferent, unchanged. That’s the true disquiet at the heart of Peter Weir’s classic mystery story: set against geological time, human concerns are little more than the blink of an eye. (lj)