What the end of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' means, according to the cast and director: Lily Sullivan as Miranda Reid and Madeleine Madden as Marion Quade on that fateful day in "Picnic at Hanging Rock"Image: amazon By Jess Joho2018-06-01 15:00:00 UTC This post contains spoilers for the Amazon miniseries Picnic at Hanging Rock

What the end of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' means, according to the cast and director: Lily Sullivan as Miranda Reid and Madeleine Madden as Marion Quade on that fateful day in "Picnic at Hanging Rock"Image: amazon By Jess Joho2018-06-01 15:00:00 UTC This post contains spoilers for the Amazon miniseries Picnic at Hanging Rock. In all its iterations, Picnic at Hanging Rock has ended its mesmerizing mystery with purposefully ambiguous conclusions. Set in 1900, it follows the story of three Australian schoolgirls who inexplicably vanish while on a field trip to the (real life) historic local landmark known as the Hanging Rock. While much of the plot revolves around figuring out what happened to them, it comes to nothing definite — inviting only more questions and speculation. Both the original 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay and the 1975 film adaptation by Peter Weil avoided concrete answers, solidifying the story's legacy as an unsolvable enigma. But the recently premiered Amazon miniseries might have the most mystifying ending of all. But the starring actors (like former Game of Thrones and Hunger Games star Natalie Dormer) and lead director (Larysa Kondracki) still have their own personal and illuminating interpretations. Like the Blair Witch Project of its time, Picnic at Hanging Rock has lead some to speculate whether the events were actually real. But famously, Lindsay opened her book with the assertion that: Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. "That’s a beautifully succinct way of saying: This a story, let it affect you however you want," said Kondracki, director of three out of six episodes. "Because it’s going to affect everyone differently." Each member of the cast echoed this caveat before giving their own interpretations on the ending. "For me it’s not about the ending — about, 'Where did they go?'" said Lily Sullivan, who plays the enigmatic leader of the missing girls, Miranda Reid.  To both Sullivan and Natalie Dormer (who plays the governess of College Appleyard), the entire story is about the folly of people looking for definitive answers to life's mysteries — and about a society that demands these young girls conform to a single ideal. Because Picnic at Hanging Rock asserts that, in order to be free, you must all learn to live in harmony with the ambiguity of human existence. Kondracki reiterated that the Amazon reimagining of the iconic story is "not so much about what happened to the girls, but who were they? And why did they want to run away in the first place?" Natalie Dormer amazes in her portayal as Mrs. Hester Appleyard in "Picnic at Hanging Rock" Image: amazon With all that said, Kondracki's direction and camera work cleverly "offers hints" to support a variety of the most popular Picnic at Hanging Rock theories. Maybe the girls just jumped — or maybe there's a more metaphorical answer. "I want people to argue about it," she said. So here's an incomplete list of some interpretations to get you thinking for yourself. According to the book In the original draft of the book, Lindsay included a final chapter with a definitive answer to what happened to the girls. Her editor smartly recommended she remove it. "Nobody stayed after dark because it’s where spirits roamed." So the published story concluded with only a brief epilogue presented as a newspaper clipping thirteen years after the events, explaining that records of the disappearances were mysteriously burned up in a bush fire. Though the search for the girls continued, the only evidence found was a piece of a dress. However, the deleted final chapter of the book was released after Lindsay's death, in a short followup novel The Secret of Hanging Rock. In it, we get our "answer." And, sure enough, it detracts much more than it adds.  Essentially, it shows the girls falling into a trance before then falling through a "hole in space." As if this sci-fi explanation weren't weird enough, two of the girls transform into crabs (yes, literal crustaceans) after going through a fateful crack in the rocks, chasing after their school teacher (Miss McCraw) who went missing prior to the events of the novel. Irma, however, gets prevented from following when a boulder blocks the path forward, leading her to eventually return to reality. The beautiful mysteries at the core of "Picnic at Hanging Rock" Image: hbo The Secret of Hanging Rock also includes several essays by academics and critics offering the interpretive meaning behind this "official" ending.  Some theorized that Lindsay intended it to symbolize the tension between colonizing British forces and the whitewashing of aboriginal peoples and culture in Australian history. The real-world Hanging Rock outside Melbourne is believed to have been a meeting place for different bordering native tribes, and a site of ceremonial significance to them.  As an Australian herself, Sullivan was hyper-aware of this aspect of the story and her country's history. She can understand the interpretation of the series as exploring “the lack of respect for this sacred ground, the Rock,” with aboriginal legends indicating that “nobody stayed after dark because it’s where spirits roamed.” It was all in Mrs. Appleyard's head One of the more fascinating interpretations present throughout the Amazon reimagining is that the whole thing was imagined by Mrs. Appleyard. It's Kondracki's favorite personal theory, because the schoolgirls can then be seen as different aspects of her deeply traumatized psyche. "They're all the opportunities that were robbed from Hester," Kondracki posited. Each represents the person she might've had, had her circumstances been different. "It’s like The Breakfast Club, right? There’s the brains, the beauty, the nerd, the funny one, the young eager kid." Hester Appleyard running from her traumatized past Image: amazon The evidence for this interpretation is embedded in the way the final episode is shot. When Mrs. Appleyard is chasing the young Lola through the college at night, there's a ghosting or mirroring effect between the two. "They basically become one person," said Kondracki. Hester eventually kills her, though others assume Lola's death is also a suicide.  They were inventions of her mind all along. Similarly, in the very last shots where Mrs. Appleyard is about to jump off the peak of the Hanging Rock, the camera swivels away from the missing girls and back at Mrs. Appleyard. When she leaps, the girls have disappeared — implying that they too were the same person: inventions of her mind all along. Sullivan could also see how the scholarship around her character, Miranda, supports this. Many view Miranda as less of a traditional character, and more of a metaphor. “She’s seen through people’s memories the whole way through the series. I’m playing different people’s interpretations of this girl who is ‘free,’ whatever that means. It’s a lot of people’s weird ideals.” Why Mrs. Appleyard commits suicide One consistency across all three adaptations of the story is the suicide of Mrs. Appleyard. But even then, there is still much room for interpretation. Hester's backstory implies that she was sold into sex slavery as a child, and eventually escapes by killing her "husband" (or pimp).  For those who believe the events of Picnic at Hanging Rock are happening inside her mind, the plot point of Hester reinventing herself in Australia as the governess of a respectable lady's college is only a fantasy. So her suicide is then the culmination of this delusion. But for Dormer, she took her character's story at face value. "Bless her: Hester needed therapy," she said. "She is profoundly traumatized and lacks any ability to process it. And it results in so many deaths around her that she cannot reconcile herself with." Miranda is an ideal of freedom to everyone in the story Image: amazon So at the very end, Dormer believes that Mrs. Appleyard is once again escaping. "To me, Hester is a victim, and unfortunately her way of dealing with it was to victimize others," she said. "When you’ve suffered profound trauma in your life there’s a fork in the road. You can choose to either break the cycle, or perpetuate it."  Mrs. Appleyard chose the wrong path. "But she realizes that at the end, and that is why she makes her choice," said Dormer. But even as she reckons with the abuse she inflicted, "there is a desire to be free — liberated from the pain. And I think we can all identify." Aliens took them There are even subtle clues in the Amazon miniseries to support the most outlandish and wacky theories that gained traction in the 1970s. As Roger Ebert wrote of the Weir film, "A cottage industry grew up in Australia about the novel and the movie; old newspapers and other records were searched without success for reports of disappearing schoolgirls." There is zero historical evidence to indicate any of it really happened. But that didn't stop people from combing through every detail of the book and movie as if it had, even compiling the speculations into another book called The Murders at Hanging Rock.  The secrets beneath the perfect appearances of "Picnic at Hanging Rock" Image: amazon Among practical theories — like the girls simply falling to their deaths in some unreachable crevice, or being raped and killed by two boys seen near the picnic area that day — one points to UFO abduction. Because, of course, when you can't explain something, it's probably aliens. In the final shots of the Amazon adaptation, the clouds around the Hanging Rock swirl oddly and everything is tinged in a red hue. As the music reaches a fever pitch, you can even hear the faint sounds of a mechanical machine, like a spaceship. What happened to the girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock? The point is we cannot know. But everyone necessarily projects onto them what they need to believe happened.  And that's why this mystery is as much about who we are as it is about who they were.