Features: DVD
Twenty years after it swept Australia into the international film spotlight, Peter Weir’s stunning masterpiece remains as ineffable as the mystery at its core. A picnic at an ancient volcanic outcropping turns to disaster when a few young girls inexplicably vanish on Hanging Rock.
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Editor's Note
When a group of schoolgirls from an elite Victorian finishing school embark on a Valentine's day excursion to an unusual outcropping of volcanic rock, four members of the party are drawn towards the summit, where they experience powerful forces of time, nature, and eroticism, and vanish into thin air. This meticulously crafted Australian film displays a remarkable sense of eerie foreboding and lush surrealist sensibility, which have earned it a rabid cult following.
Plot Summary
Weir's (TRUMAN SHOW, DEAD POETS SOCIETY) exotic story employs tranquil surrealism and lush cinematography to explore the interconnected relationships between nature, eroticism and repression. While out climbing rocks, three girls from a posh finishing school vanish without a trace. In an attempt to find them, a geometry teacher climbs the rock and follows them into oblivion. A young man who has seen the teacher running up the mountain in a pair of bloomers, decides to spend the night on the rock, in hopes of finding the girls. But in the morning he is discovered with a wound on his head and no recollection of what happened. And when one of the girls later returns she's also wounded and dazed. A truly alluring, enigmatic film.
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