Tomorrow night, Turner Classic Movies will air the enigmatic Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) by Australian filmmaker Peter Weir. An Australian girls school goes on an outing to a striking geological formation – and some of the girls and a teacher disappear. What happened to them? It’s beautiful and hypnotic and haunting. It’s a film masterpiece, but if you can’t handle ambiguous endings – this ain’t for you.
Weir has gone on to make high quality hits (The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Master and Commander), but Picnic at Hanging Rock – the movie that he made at age 31 – is his most original work. Besides playing periodically on TCM, Picnic at Hanging Rock is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant and Hulu Plus.