Wish You Were Here (2012)

This well-acted 2015 movie about an Australian foursome's trouble-filled holiday to Cambodia and its aftermath is rather dishonestly marketed as a mystery and while there is an investigation (an inert and highly unlikely one) launched in Sydney, Australia after only three of the bogans return from the trip, viewers who persist through the protracted misery, I mean mystery, will be disappointed by a revelation at the end that is impossible to predict and that makes the movie's whole fall apart, unless some tenuous thing is being suggested that links marital and familial dischord, bad behaviour overseas, and trauma.

★★☆☆☆

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Under the Sand (Sous Le Sable) (2000)

A woman's husband vanishes without trace from an unpatrolled beach in France in François Ozon's precursor to his 2003 Swimming Pool, another movie in which he has Charlotte Rampling doing what Charlotte Rampling does (in 45 Years, in Swimming Pool...), drifting around as an emotionally, physically distant older woman who may or may not be delusional, grappling with loneliness or interacting with figaments of her imagination.

★★★★☆

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Strangerland (2015)

Miranda and her friends similarly dreamily wandered off into an Australian landscape and vanished but this movie is far less captivating than that, clearly trying but failing at being a new enduring Australian bush mystery of the mystic Picnic at Hanging Rock variety but also failing in its attempts at gritty Australian neo-noir realism of the, say, Mystery Road variety, because although Nicole Kidman is captivating, nothing else is remotely interesting in this dreary, unrewarding story of a promiscuous teen and her brother who are removed from the face of the red Australian earth by a duststorm.

★★☆☆☆

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Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

The incompatiability of the English sensibilities of early white Australians with the hot, dry Australian landscape and the wariness and suspicions harboured by Western invaders towards the bush are themes beautifully realised in Peter Weir's enigmatic film of the Joan Lindsay book which has a teacher and a group of schoolgirls like Botticellian angels quietly vanish without trace up Hanging Rock while on a school picnic.

★★★★☆

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