though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves.

[intertribal]

Picnic at Hanging Rock may seem like a boring (if beautiful) movie - boarding school girls in 1800s Victoria, Australia go on a rare excursion from their castle-like cattle pen to Hanging Rock for the afternoon.  The opening scenes reminded me too terribly of the school I attend.  But my mother saw it in grad school and wanted to see it again, and that's proof enough for me. 

Essentially it is A Passage to India in film form (and yes I know, there's already a film version of that book).  Foreigners, both politically and biologically, visit a place of natural wonder to claim it as their own sanctuary - as one girl says, "we might be the only living things in the world", even while tiny animals flourish all around them; as another girl says, "waiting a million years... just for us!" - and experience something so violently disturbing that despite their best, clinical efforts to understand, they can't explain in the slightest.  Just like Forster's ou-boum, the entire community suffers the repercussions of their own waking, and treading on, something much too large for their overgrown simian brains to handle. 

The extremely eerie soundtrack and some sharp editing and cinematography make the audience feel the spooky ambience in which you don't see anything per se - you have no proof per se that anything outerworldly is happening and yet you just know it is.  I don't really credit the director for this - it's really the only good movie he's made in his life, and it was practically his debut - I think it was Joan Lindsay's story, written as if it might be true.  That of course is what made it so popular.  Could it be that on Valentine's Day in 1800 three angelic little girls and their mathematical teacher vanished on Hanging Rock?  Well, yes, maybe, but how and why?  An entire book of suggested theories was published - but just as the characters could not resolve the mystery, neither could the general audience.  Joan Lindsay did write a final, eighteenth chapter, in which she explains it all.  She took it out before publishing it, so as not to spoil the mystery.  I did read it, though.  I couldn't help it.  I wanted to know how the authoress explained her own Gordian knot.  Personally, I'm very pleased with it.