Picnic at Hanging Rock review – Australian fever dream still dazzling 50 years on

Peter Weir’s 1975 parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria, rereleased for its 50th anniversary, is a classic of Australian new wave cinema

• ‘Clambering about in Victorian boots was brutal’: how we made Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir’s eerie and lugubrious mystery chiller from 1975, adapted by screenwriter Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsay, is now rereleased for its 50th anniversary. It’s a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria: the bizarre and unclassifiable story of three demure and porcelain-white schoolgirls and one teacher who on Valentine’s Day 1900 – with the 19th century over and the Victorian age less than a year to run – simply vanish in the burning sun while on a picnic excursion to the forbiddingly vast monolith Hanging Rock in southern Australia. No one here uses the Indigenous name Ngannelong and the only Indigenous character is a tracker.

They disappear while exploring its rugged forms and inlets, which weirdly resemble the faces of Easter Island statues. Like the Marabar Caves in Forster’s A Passage to India, Hanging Rock is the centre of some unknowable enigma, almost audibly humming or throbbing with insects, a phenomenon that resists being subdued by the outsider’s rational law.