A visual poem that gets under your skin like sunstroke, a mystery that doesn't ask to be solved, but experienced. Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock is a work that floats outside of time and narrative conventions, a cinematic experience that acts by subtraction, opening up an abyss of questions and then refusing, with superb and cruel elegance, to provide even a single, meager answer. Its power lies not in the plot, but in the atmosphere; not in the solution to the enigma, but in its almost cosmic persistence. It is a feverish dream from which one never fully awakens.

On Valentine's Day 1900, the students of Appleyard College, an austere outpost of Victorian civilization planted in the wild heart of the Australian bush, are granted permission for an outing to the foot of the imposing rock formation of Hanging Rock. Under a relentless sun that seems to liquefy the contours of reality, amid the narcotic buzzing of insects and the reading of poetry, something happens. Or rather, something stops happening. The clocks stop at noon. Four girls, led by the ethereal and almost supernatural Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), decide to climb the rock. Three of them, along with a teacher, will vanish into thin air, swallowed up by the ancestral silence of that monolith that has existed for millions of years before man and will continue to exist millions of years after his disappearance.

Weir builds his masterpiece on a fundamental, almost metaphysical dichotomy: on the one hand, the gilded cage of British colonial civilization, with its suffocating corsets, white gloves, etiquette lessons, and memorized verses. It is a world of repression and enforced order, embodied by the glacial and tyrannical headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), whose rigidity is as fragile as porcelain ready to crack. On the other hand, there is Nature. Not the romantic and domesticated nature of English parks, but a primordial, telluric force, indifferent and powerful. Hanging Rock is not a backdrop, it is an entity. Its rocks have phallic and anthropomorphic shapes, they seem to observe, to wait. It is a pagan place, a temple of ancient and forgotten deities who have no interest in good manners or European poetry. The girls' ascent of the rock is an act of liberation and, at the same time, a sacrifice. They take off their gloves, remove their stockings, abandon themselves to a sensual torpor, responding to an atavistic call that their education has tried in every way to stifle.

Russell Boyd's cinematography, which won a well-deserved BAFTA, is the key element that transforms the film into a hypnotic experience. Using filters and veils on the lens, Boyd creates a soft, diffused, almost impressionistic image. The Australian sunlight is not clear and bright, but milky, dreamlike, as if we were observing the scene through the veil of a memory or, indeed, a dream. This visual style, which owes as much to the painting of the Australian Heidelberg School as to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in portraying its nymph-like maidens, serves to constantly erode our perception of reality. We never know whether what we see is objective or the result of the protagonists' overheated and repressed psyche. The soundtrack, which alternates between Bruce Smeaton's evocative scores and the haunting, poignant sound of Gheorghe Zamfir's pan flute, completes the spell, transporting us to a dimension where logic gives way to the inexplicable.

After the disappearance, the film transforms. It deliberately deviates from the path of the conventional thriller or mystery. The search for the girls becomes a pretext to explore the true subject of the work: the collapse of order in the face of numinous chaos. The community, unable to process an event without a cause, falls apart. The obsession of the young English aristocrat Michael (Dominic Guard) who searches for the girls is less an investigation and more a mystical pilgrimage, an attempt to commune with the enigma. Appleyard College itself falls apart, victim of hysteria and scandal, its facade of respectability crumbling to reveal the emptiness and despair it concealed. The tragedy of little Sara (Margaret Nelson), the orphan obsessed with Miranda, becomes the dark, beating heart of the film, a painfully human counterpoint to the cosmic mystery of the rock.

It is impossible not to draw a parallel with Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. There, too, a woman disappears on a volcanic island, and her absence, rather than the search for her, becomes the catalyst that exposes the existential emptiness of the remaining characters. But while Antonioni used mystery to dissect the vacuity of the modern bourgeoisie, Weir uses it to explore the clash between Western rationality and a panicky, ancestral mysticism. Absence in Weir is not emptiness, but an oppressive presence, an energy that contaminates and destroys everything it touches. Almost a quarter of a century later, Sofia Coppola would capture its spectral echo in her The Virgin Suicides, another film about enigmatic and lost femininity, wrapped in dreamy and nostalgic photography.

Based on Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel of the same name, the film draws its ultimate strength from a crucial production choice. The author had written a final chapter, the eighteenth, which provided a supernatural (and frankly disappointing) explanation for the disappearance, linked to a time warp or metamorphosis. The chapter was removed at the publisher's suggestion before publication and only made public posthumously. Weir, in agreement with Lindsay, chose to ignore it completely, instinctively understanding that the power of the story lay precisely in its indecisiveness. Providing a solution would have turned a work of art into a banal mystery story. By leaving us in doubt, Weir forces us to confront the limits of our understanding, with the idea that there are forces in the universe that our logic cannot contain or explain.

Picnic at Hanging Rock was a milestone of the Australian New Wave, the film movement that in the 1970s revealed talents such as Weir, George Miller, and Bruce Beresford to the world. It was a film that defined a national identity not through folkloric clichés, but by exploring the deep and disturbing relationship between European settlers and an ancient and incomprehensible continent. It is a film about “colonial gothic,” where terror comes not from ruined castles and ghosts, but from the blinding light of day and a landscape whose beauty is inseparable from its menace. Civilization is a thin layer of paint that can be scraped away in an instant, revealing the nothingness or the everything that lies beneath.

In the end, the question “what happened to the girls?” is the wrong one. The right question is “what does their disappearance reveal about us?” It reveals our desperate need for answers, our terror of emptiness, the fragility of our social and rational constructs. The film denies us the catharsis of a solution, offering us something much more precious and lasting in return: an eternal enigma. A work that, with each viewing, offers no new certainties, but deepens the beauty of its mystery, leaving us exactly like its characters: lost, enchanted, and forever haunted by a secret that the rock will keep forever. As Edgar Allan Poe's poem quoted in the film says, and which constitutes its definitive hermeneutic key: “What we see and what we seem is but a dream. A dream within a dream.”