Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, director Peter Weir's lyrical, enigmatic masterpiece is an imaginative tease. The setting is a proper turn-of-the century Australian boarding school for girls, a suffocating institution built on strict moral codes, repressed sexuality, and a subtle but enforced class structure. As the film opens, girls draped in immaculate white dress prepare for a picnic at the nearby volcanic formation, Hanging Rock, and Weir hangs an air of dark foreboding over the proceeding. "You'll have to love someone else, because I won't be... here very long," says one virginal girl, Miranda, to her friend. Her words are prophetic: during the picnic, Miranda, along with two other girls and an uptight schoolmistress, vanish into the rocks. While a search party repeatedly returns to the rock to look for either the girls or the reasons for their disappearance, Weir leaves the mystery unsolved. Like Antonioni's L'Avventura, the vanishing is open to numerous interpretations--both rational and illusory--but Weir drops enough allegorical clues that it feels like a parable. He transforms the landscape and weather into menacing and eerie images; outlines of faces can be seen in the rocks, while the oppressive heat beating down on the picnic doubles as an atmospheric metaphor for the girls' unbearable social and sexual confinement. These images and other plot twists toward the end hint that this mysterious vanishing, on some level, was actually a form of spiritual escape--the only out, other than death, from the film's bleak, tightly structured community. Regardless of how you see it, though, this hypnotic puzzle remains the highlight of the '70s Australian New Wave. --Dave McCoy
Read moreLess
Picnic at Hanging Rock
A film that ventures successfully into the mystic and bravely offers no answer to its central puzzle, just a question that continues to haunt the mind. Whether you want to regard it as a parable of sexual awakening or of colonial repression, it successful
Walkabout meets The Vanishing in Peter Weir's Victorian mystery adapted from a Joan Lindsay novel that many believe - incorrectly - to be based on a true story.
In 1900 19 girls and two teachers from a boarding school go on a Valentine's Day outing to the Aborigine landmark of Hanging Rock, outside Melbourne in Australia. Mysteriously, three of them, and the teacher, disappear. A week later one of them is found, but she has no memory of what happened. A young man, intrigued by the events, decides to investigate for himself after the police find no trace of the other women. Have they been kidnapped, murdered or had an accident? Or is there something more peculiar...
Picnic at Hanging Rock
On St Valentine's Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls enjoys a day at Hanging Rock, a local beauty spot. But something odd is at work: clocks stop at midday and three girls vanish. Dingo dogs, extraterrestrials, kidnappers or what? In this psychological take on the mystery, director Peter Weir leaves clues hanging in the air like a glistening spider's web, hears celestial choirs and thrumming insects — he hasn't the foggiest, but he adores ambiguity, mysticism and metaphor. It's a very sexy picture, which stares an enigma straight in the eye and, in the process, proved to the world that the new Australian cinema was capable of making films other than those that fea...
If you are new to watching movies online, this guide will certainly help you. Read full guide...
At Two-Movies.com we share with you the links to sites that have the films ready for you to watch. All you need to
do is select the source site. So click on the chosen link, close any pop-up advertisements, and press play. The
higher the rating a source file has - the better.
From time to time the source files may have been removed and the link won't work. If this is the case please let us
know by reporting broken links.
And don't forget to vote on the quality of the link you choose; by giving it the thumbs up or the thumb down. We
welcome feedback so let us know how you got on.
