10 Brilliant Movie Endings That Give You The Finger
4. Picnic At Hanging Rock
Picnic at Hanging Rock, an Australian mystery film directed by the great Peter Weir, is one of the most haunting and chilling movies you'll ever watch, and why? Well, Weir's note-perfect directing and the eerie musical score are extremely effective but arguably, the lack of any resolution is what really makes this so disturbing.
Three schoolgirls and a teacher disappear on Hanging Rock, an Aboriginal rock formation in the Australian Outback. One girl later returns but has no memory of the ordeal, while the other three are never seen ever again, leaving everyone in the community forever traumatized.
Some might find this ending too opaque and that's more than fair. Each to their own. Still, there's an argument to be made that this movie is all the better for its lack of answers. Picnic is often described as a mystery but really, it's more about the psychological effects of the disappearances on everyone else, and also about the Australian settlers' fear of the wild and mysterious landscape of the continent they came to live in.
By refusing to explain what happened to the girls, the film places viewers right in the shoes of the traumatized community around them and to answer the mystery would be to lessen the overwhelming horror of the unknown that this oft-underrated masterpiece confronts us with.