Picnic at Hanging Rock
BBC TWO, 9.05PM
St Valentine’s Day, 1900. Four pupils at an exclusive finishing school in the Australian bush disappear during a picnic, throwing the school and its wealthy patrons into turmoil. What happened to them? This six-part series from Beatrix Christian and Alice Addision toys with perspectives and timelines to uncover a cauldron of adolescent tensions, suppressed violence and good old Victorian hypocrisy, handled with maturity by a young cast that includes Romper Stomper’s Lily Sullivan.
This is, it is important to note, an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel rather than Peter Weir’s superbly strange 1975 film. Yet comparisons are inevitable, and where Weir’s stifling, sexually charged atmosphere felt effortless, here it feels a little too calculated; ditto the film’s seductive enigma and drift, now in part replaced by exposition and narrative. Taken on its own terms, however, as a woozy thriller, it works just fine, helped no end by terrific camerawork and a superb lead performance from Game of Thrones’s Natalie Dormer, teetering between calm control and unhinged mania as Hester Appleyard, the headmistress whose secrets are outnumbered only by her demons.