Retold mystery struggles to find narrative focus

As a novel (in 1967) and a film (in 1975), “Picnic at Hanging Rock” had a couple of features that could be problematic in 2018.

Set in 1900 in the Australian countryside, where provincial gentility rubbed up against indigenous culture and wild nature, the story centered on a series of disappearances and deaths of girls and women — symbolically done in by, or perhaps mystically transcending, their repressive environment.

It was not a story of empowerment.

Even worse, by current standards, the instigating mystery — the disappearance of three boardingschool girls and one of their teachers during a hike up Hanging Rock, an actual geological feature near Melbourne — was left unsolved.

Did they jump, did they run, were they killed, were they transported? No definitive answer was provided.

So what were the creators of a new, six-episode “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” made for Australian television and streaming on Amazon Prime, to do?

The evidence suggests they couldn’t settle on one answer to that question.

The writers, Beatrix Christian and Alice Addison, have kept the basic framework set forth in the Joan Lindsay novel and the Peter Weir film.

But within that structure, they’ve been busy. In addition to the historical-supernatural spook fest of the original, there are a number of narratives fighting for space in this new “Picnic.”

There’s a Moll Flanders-style backstory for the school’s headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Natalie Dormer of “Game of Thrones”), which helps explain her desperate desire to maintain respectability and to exert control over the girls.

The tale of the orphaned student Sara (Inez Curro) has been expanded and made even more Dickensian.

There’s now some solemnly overheated melodrama involving sexual exploration and jealousy, and every once in a while a modern meangirl comedy takes over. And in case we forget that the whole thing started life as a Victorian ghost story, some screen time is devoted to reading “The Turn of the Screw” out loud.

All this embellishment comes with a commensurate multiplication of tones and styles, sometimes within a scene. Fairly straightforward period drama mixes, uneasily, with thoroughly contemporary flourishes of satirical comedy and theatrical self-consciousness.

The actors mostly acquit themselves well, though Dormer’s coy seductiveness isn’t a good fit for the headmistress and Yael Stone goes way over the top as the most pious of the school’s governesses.

The vaudevillian, throw-everythingatapproach might reflect the creators’ sensibilities, or it might be a somewhat panicked reaction to the ambiguities of the story.

The effect of all this is diminution. Weir’s film is a creepily effective tour-de-force — he uses his mastery of image and mood to make palpable both the stultifying atmosphere of Victorian Australia and the punishing heat and vertigo of a hike up Hanging Rock.

Without that kind of control and pictorial fluency, the story loses its sensuality, and all that’s left is a cliched melodrama.