But their motives are too often hollowed out by the imagery. The camera floats as if detached from reality, before fixing itself at an angle to suggest an unnatural world. Stylised interludes, cut so that they're merely jarring flashes, punctuate the plot. The production design is evocative, but it's elevated to the confined excess of a hothouse, while the landscape is perceived differently by each director. A column of smoke hasn't been this menacing since Lost.

The eye or the imagination never wants for stimulus – there is no shortage of creepy men, from mysterious riders to a lurking English toff, presented as possible suspects in the disappearance. But some of the box-ticking elements lessen the impact. The absence of an Indigenous presence suggested a foreboding landmark poised for reckoning in Weir's film, while the series adds Tom (Mark Coles Smith), the Indigenous school handyman who is little more than a nice guy.

The plot's gambit is that it can fill out the mystery by delving into backstories, most notably with the headmistress and founder of the girls' school, Hester Appleyard (Game of Thrones graduate Natalie Dormer). Like many of the players, she has two sides: a respectable public face and a hidden past among Britain's criminal milieu, and with her angled slash of a mouth Dormer is exceedingly good at suggesting a survivor trying to outrun her ghosts – at least until the ghosts are made literal.

You keep waiting for the show to bear down and find a focus. There's a gripping scene where Miranda is cornered for sexual assault by a soldier and he tells her "steady now" as he draws close, as if she's a wild horse yet to be broken, but its powerful realism is never referred to again. The repeated definition of the young women is in repose, whether on a bed or the ground, as if exhausted or consumed by their actions. Picnic at Hanging Rock keeps coming back to rituals. They charge the atmosphere, until it simply dissipates.

What adds to the disappointment is that Foxtel has already made a local drama about a young woman trying to find answers in her unbalanced life amid the dislocating otherness of the Australian bush. It's called The Kettering Incident and it's original, incisive and compelling. It aired two years ago and very little in Picnic at Hanging Rock comes close to matching it.