On Valentine’s Day, 1900, a bunch of girls from an Australian boarding school go on a day out to the ominous Hanging Rock. It soon becomes clear that there’s an essential
wrongness about the place. Clocks stop at midday and, amid the heat, the girls enter a kind of disorientated enchantment. Seemingly bewitched and in a trance, three of them disappear (plus one of their teachers, played by Vivean Gray – Mrs. Mangel from
Neighbours). I last saw this film at least 30 years ago but the utterly haunting image of the girls in their white dresses – walking, somehow mesmerised, towards a fate that is brilliantly never explained – has stayed with me ever since.
Like all of the world’s most terrifying stories, this
adaptation of the Joan Lindsay novel understands that the less you explain the more scary it becomes. The film works on multiple levels. It’s a supernatural thriller but also a historical drama that takes on issues of class division, female repression and sexuality, and social control inside and outside of institutions.
The music by Gheorghe Zamfir (panpipe) and Marcel Cellier (organ) is especially effective and goes a long way towards building the atmosphere. Sophia Coppola's film
The Virgin Suicides, which covers similar themes, had an oddly similar kind of soundtrack (by Air), so was presumably influenced by this film.
Peter Weir’s direction is stunning: it’s shot in a way that really enhances the sense of dazed, ethereal bewitchment.
A masterpiece.
