This movie is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay and should be a fairly accurate adaptation. It pretends to be based on real events, but it is pure fiction. The nature of the ending of the movie, or rather the lack thereof, has made it a cult movie around guessing what it is really about. A painting exist by a William Ford from 1875, called "At the Hanging Rock", picturing a scene much like the one in the movie, where the girls rest at the rock. There are good reasons to think that, at least, this has served as inspiration for Lindsay to write the story.
During a valentine´s day picnic to a peculiar rock formation called Hanging Rock, four girls and a teacher from a private girl-school disappear mysteriously. One of the girls comes screaming back, but has no memory of the incident. Several search parties are launched to find the rest of the missing persons, but to no avail. A young man who witnessed the girls venture up the rock, who fell in love with Miranda, goes up to look for her. Later his friend finds him in shock up there but is lead by him to find another girl still alive. From there on we are treated with an apparently incoherent mosaic of events back at the school, that can be interpreted in numerous ways. There are references to sexuality and coming of age throughout and a sense of the rock being a place of dreams or higher purpose of some sort. The girls, particularly Sara, is treated harshly and when the girl found last returns from recreation away from the school, she is attacked for not revealing what has happened to the missing girls. But it is still completely open to interpretation and the open structure is obviously what has kept the interest for the movie awake in movie fans all these years. Another important aspect is the choice of music. There is a haunting score by pan flute player Georghe Zamfir, that has a very progressive feel a la Pink Floyd to it. Then this is sometimes mixed with some scary synthesizer parts that feels awkwardly out of place with the images they follow. Thirdly there are passages with beautiful classical music, predominantly the haunting second movement of Beethoven´s fifth piano concerto, which I think is supposed to be the theme for Miranda.
Now, for the sake of my dear readers, I have actually sat through the movie twice, just for the purpose of bringing to you a hopefully well argued and interesting analysis in this review. The main theme is female sexuality and more specifically, the transition from a dependent child to a sexual, grown up, individual woman. There are two characters that stand out clearly and those are Mrs. Appleyard, the school headmistress and the pupil Sara, so their "relationship" must be the key to understanding this movie. Very early on we know that Sara is in love with Miranda. Sara is probably a lesbian, while Miranda is bisexual, or at least willing to have some sexual relation with Sara while kept away at the girls only school, despite being attracted to boys. "Hanging rock" is a metaphor for your true self, the state of mind that is a hundred percent yourself and acts from your own desires and genuine virtues. I base this assumption on the lizard that is present when the girls rest, before their disappearance. Lizards are symbolising dreams and the unconscious. And that the girls that "come back" from their dreamlike true self experience, cannot remember anything. Sara is kept from even going there, as a punishment for disobeying the mother figure, Mrs. Appleyard. Now as the psychological state of Mrs. Appleyard is provoked, she gets more and more nasty towards Sara and in the end is faced with the fact that she dies, and very likely is murdered. Appleyard tries to lie her way out of the fact that Sara died, but she has to face the reality that her true self already knows. When the gardener knocks at the door to bring the sad news of Saras fate, we hear Sara´s scream before he enters and Appleyard is already dressed in mourning black, with all Sara´s luggage (metaphorical description of her own unconscious past) packed and ready to carry on. She is later found dead after an attempt to climb the rock. This is a metaphor for her inability to be her true self because she was killed by her false self. So the conclusion is ... Sara and Mrs. Appleyard is one and the same person. Sara is Appleyard as a young girl. I base this on the observation that all scenes where Sara and Appleyard are shown together, there is no cutting in the film. This story is about Mrs. Appleyard´s destructed personality, that she keeps inflicting on the world, to avoid being faced with the identical reality of her own past. She is a lesbian, and her partner is the masculine (as she herself says) Miss Lumley in her present adult life. But she was in love with a "Miranda" (a Botticelli angel) in her youth who probably went and found a boy, instead of staying in a slightly involuntary lesbian relationship with her. There is also a possibility of Miranda betraying her with another girl, visualized in the scene at the rock where Miranda crawls on top another girl though a gap. Being physically and emotionally kept from developing her own sexuality is very much indicated in the scene where she is tied up at the back wall and kept from even interacting when the last girl found, returns to say good bye to the other girls, wearing a blood red drape and hat. Metaphorically she is covered in blood as a symbol of having become a woman and being free to discover the world and her sexuality on her own. But still, there are lots of other aspects that i have not connected to this theory, so there are still a lot to be discovered. For instance the link between Sara´s brother, his friend and the girls who disappear.
This is a kind of movie that i can watch again and again and still find new small details, that eluded me before. If you figure out one certain explanation, things you did not give much attention before, suddenly becomes very important. It is a very haunting and mysterious movie about suppressed emotions, that are up there with the best of its kind. A true masterpiece.
Rating: 10/10
