35mm at Metrograph
The problem with this concept is that it disposes of all its interesting characters early on, leaving us to putter around with caricatures for an hour and a half.
Pretty obviously an influence on many things I love, Marie Antoinette, The Leftovers, the folk horror canon. But I’m convinced everybody has only seen the first act of this. Seriously, who cares about Michael, Albert, and Edith? Or whether or not Appleyard College will survive its financial losses? It’s not like I expect narrative concision from impressionistic films about sexual frustration, but I do expect some level of stylistic focus. The back half of Picnic is just C-tier kitchen-sink-adjacent realism.
If you enjoy Michael’s freak out on the rock (which is admittedly a brief respite from the doldrums), I recommend the heading west/California Gold Rush sequence in The New Land.