In this week’s bumper roundup of movie articles/reviews from the intertubes, the one that stuck out for me was a truly spiffy essay by Megan Abbott on Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. I can still remember that feeling of how completely bowled over I was when I first saw it, decades ago, and that I still experience all over again each time I rewatch it: whatever else Picnic may be (and it’s a lot else), it’s among the best fantasy movies every made, in that Weir unerringly put his finger upon one of the things that make fantasy literature and cinema so compelling . . . the sense of there being something around the corner, just not quite yet visible to you, that is truly marvelous, truly incomprehensible. We never do solve the mystery of what happened to the girls, and that’s what the solution is.
The Joan Lindsay novel upon which the movie is based, and which shares that same enigmatic shine, is well worth reading, as is Yvonne Rousseau’s brilliant commentary/gloss/subversion The Murders at Hanging Rock.