Picnic at Hanging Rock

There's so much that's wrong with this new version of the Australian classic that it's hard to know where to start. First there's the direction - tricksy, flashy and sprinkled with "creative" flourishes more evocative of 80s music videos than Australia in 1900. It's uneven from episode to episode, unhelpful in establishing the kind of eerie, dreamy atmosphere that the story demands, and frequently just yanks us out of the period and out of the story. The performances are jarringly uneven too, ranging from naturalistic (though, unfortunately, in an anachronistic contemporary style) to fruity amateur-theatrical emoting, with highly questionable accents. The location for the girl's school is ludicrously lavish, a sprawling mansion replete with marble columns and ornate fixtures - an unlikely girl's school anywhere in Australia at any time, but utterly nonsensical in a remote rural area in 1900. And then there's the depiction of the bush and hanging rock itself - over-saturated hues that make everything seem green and lush, and even a shimmering lake. It looks more English than Australian, and absolutely nothing like the dry Macedon Ranges in which the story is set. The same lack of care extends to the dialogue and the depiction of social conventions of the time, with almost every exchange between "the gentry" and the lower orders being hilariously unlikely. If you watch this Picnic with the expectation of something eerie and other-worldly, you may well find it... and it's most likely the sound of poor Joan Lindsay turning in her grave.

...not because the series was bad, although what I did see was incredibly bad, but because I could not get past the 1990's New Age soundtrack. Not only did it sound more like dinner music played in an desperately upscale restaurant, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story and was intrusive enough to take me right out of the show and start wondering what Kitaro is doing these days.

See Peter Weir's masterpiece or read the book! They're magical, haunting and classic. This on the other hand, isn't. Did filmmakers really forget how to make that dreamy look? It looks too crisp and clean for a dreamy, surreal tale of mystery...just sayin'. I love Dormer but I don't think she fit the character. I loved the costumes!

It's unlikely that approximately six hours of TV are required to make a spin-off from a source-novel of less-than two-hundred pages. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', like Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', draws power from what's left unsaid. Whereas Joan Lindsay, in the original book, has the imagination to step-inside an earlier time-period, this adaptation simply superimposes twenty-first century mores onto a world where they don't belong. Nearly everyone has become 'pan-sexual'; and it's highly unlikely that a young aboriginal woman would have attended a posh girls' school in Australia c.1900 (no matter how politically correct this might be). The episodes are often terribly over-directed. Natalie Dormer seemed miscast as 'Mrs Appleyard'. 'Miranda', 'Irma' and 'Marion' are played by exquisitely beautiful actresses, but the characters come across as annoying and shallow. Lola Bessis really shines in an expanded characterization of 'Mademoiselle'.

In the 1967 book, the missing girls are kept in the background, becoming more-of an idea or enigmatic symbol. A large part of the novel consists of the author - a woman - writing about women being viewed by men (Michael, a young, upper-class Englishman, and his working-class Aussie friend, Albert). Bringing the senior-boarders right into the foreground distorts the story, producing diminishing returns. And 'Mrs Appleyard' has been disastrously rewritten. More is definitely less in this case.

Tedious 6-hour series based on the classic 1975 Australian film about a group of female students and a teacher who disappear at Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day in 1900. Everything in this series is wrong: the casting of Mrs. Appleyard, the behavior and attitudes of the girls, and the hideous and anachronistic music.

The added backstories to the various characters is obvious padding and distracts from the central mystery that gets sidelined by a bunch of soap opera hogwash about runaway wives, separated siblings, and vaguely gay and lesbian leanings. None of this claptrap has anything to do with the disappearances.

Natalie Dormer is miscast in the central role of of headmistress (Rachel Roberts starred in the original), and she plays the part much too broadly. We don't need to know all the particulars; all we need to know is that she is stern and mysterious. The only acting standout in the cast is James Hoare as Albert, and he is only tangentially connected to the mystery.

Then there's the modern PC casting of the half-black student enrolled in a white girls' finishing school in the Victorian Australian Outback in 1900. Ya right! A total of 3 directors worked on the 6 episodes, with at least two writers working on separate episodes. That's just a clue as to why this mess is so disjointed and lacking in any unified vision whatsoever.