- The Art-House Cheat Sheet
Issue 1
Think You Know Picnic at Hanging Rock? Think Again.
Screening for the Queen’s Film Society, Tuesday, August 5th • 7 PM • The Queen Theatre
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of cinema’s most mysterious masterpieces, The Queen’s Film Society presents Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, Australia 1975), in a brand-new 4K restoration—presenting a night of revelations you won’t find anywhere else. Read these notes to prepare yourself for a deep dive experience into cinephilia heaven.
Peter Weir’s haunting 1975 horror-tinged erotic mystery, based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, stunned critics when it premiered in Australia, and again the following year at the Cannes Film Festival. Reviewers compared its enigmatic power to the work of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Malick. Weir went on to direct Witness, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander, earning seven Oscar nominations and an honorary Academy Award in 2023. But to many cinephiles, Picnic at Hanging Rock and his other early Australian films (The Last Wave, Gallipoli) remain his most profound legacy.
Here’s what you might not know—and what we’ll reveal at the screening:
· Two versions exist. We’ll be showing the better cut, one that is far more unsettling in its implications than the one most filmgoers have seen.
· The novel’s final chapter was suppressed for decades. Lindsay’s shocking original ending was withheld, by the author herself, just before the novel was published, and remained unknown to the filmmakers when they created their adaptation. It is so strange, that stories about its content were dismissed for years as a myth. We’ll tell you where to read it—and why it changes everything.
· Oscar-caliber cast. Rachel Roberts (This Sporting Life) and Jackie Weaver (Animal Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook) deliver unforgettable performances in roles that still echo. Dominic Guard (The Go-Between) and Helen Morse (A Town Like Alice) add star appeal and sexiness in memorable key roles.
· Layer upon layer of meaning. The film has been interpreted as a study in repressed desire, colonial guilt and metaphysical horror. With each viewing, it deepens.
· Kubrick was a fan. So impressed was Stanley Kubrick that he personally recommended Weir to Warner Bros. Echoes of Picnic haunt The Shining—from its daylight eeriness to its buried themes of Indigenous displacement.
· It changed Australia. The film helped turn Hanging Rock into a global tourist destination—controversial, since the land is sacred to Aboriginal communities.
· Fact or fiction? Lindsay insisted for years the story was based on real events. Eventually, she admitted it came to her in a dream.
Tips:
- Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in the Australian outback. Ask yourself, where are the Aborigines?
- The film begins with a quotation from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. What did Poe famously say was the “most poetical topic in the world”?
- What’s so humorous about the context in which the film cuts to a close-up of a colony of ants devouring a discarded slice of cake?
- Why are there so many white swans in the film? White swans are not indigenous to Australia.
- Pay close attention to Michael Fitzhubert.
Few films have cast a spell across the last five decades like Picnic at Hanging Rock. Its hypnotic beauty, elliptical storytelling, and eerie ambiguity continue to inspire artists, scholars, and dreamers around the world. Find out why for yourself.
Join us Tuesday, August 5th at 7 PM at The Queen Theatre for a rare chance to see the superior version of the film on the big screen, and hear untold stories and secrets behind the film that made cinema history.
Only at the Queen’s Film Society. Don’t miss it.
