Reviewing Peter Weir‘s recently Blu-rayed Picnic at Hanging Rock (1979) some 31 years ago was a kind of cliff-leap experience. I didn’t know at first how to explain what it actually amounted to (at least according to the cinema-appreciation terms I was used to), or where it had actually “gone” in a narrative sense, but I knew it had a curiously haunting (and haunted) quality, and that the unsolvability of the disappearance of two or three schoolgirls wasn’t the thing as much as how the mystery just hung there in the air, and how the humid Australian sun seemed to gradually melt the characters’ brains.
