Traumatising a new generation
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK BBC TWO, TODAY, 9.05PM
IT MIGHT be a stretch to say that Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock scarred a generation of kids who saw it. But it certainly scarred me.
In fact, it remains one of those films that even today, whenever it’s mentioned in adult company, is guaranteed to send a collective shudder through those who watched it at a young age.
A genuinely haunting experience, in the sense that it lingers long in the memory, it was a broodingly mysterious, half-told story of a bunch of young, prim schoolgirls at an Australian finishing school who go missing when they trek to the titular Hanging Rock in the Outback.
The film was, as you would expect from Weir, so beautifully shot that even the baking heat of the Australian desert looked clinical and cold, while Gheorghe Zamfir’s score was both bloody terrifying and perhaps the only time in recorded memory where the use of pan pipes was forgivable.
Tonight sees the highly anticipated TV adaptation of Picnic At Hanging Rock (BBC Two, 9.05pm) and while expectations are high, so is the bar they must reach.
Natalie Dormer plays the glacial Hester Appleyard, who runs the Appleyard private girls’ boarding school with a mixture of cruelty and cold contempt.
When some of her pupils head off for a Valentine’s Day picnic at the Hanging Rock, three children and a teacher simply vanish without trace and therein lies the mystery which has entranced people since Joan Lindsay’s book was published in 1967.
Dormer is perfectly cast as the icy school marm with secrets of her own, and the suffocating juxtaposition of Victorian clothes and attitudes in the middle of the almost prehistoric wildness and unforgivably elemental terrain of the Outback is, in its own way, a major character.
The film and the book on which it was based were perfectly content to take their time with the plot, developing a slow-build of menace and impending doom.
This TV adaptation takes the same approach, although Dormer has been quick to say that “it’s not a costume drama, it’s helpful to think of it more in sci-fi terms”.
If anything, Picnic At Hanging Rock owes more to late Gothic horror, but if this version can encapsulate even a modicum of the sheer dread of Weir’s cinematic version, then we’re all in for a nice, eerie treat...
The Handmaid’s Tale (RTÉ2, tomorrow, 9.30pm) reaches its season finale tomorrow night and it has been fascinating to see how quickly a show which grabbed the culture by the zeitgeist has become stale.
More than that, it has become boring, and while it still has its moments, it ain’t the beast it used to be.