Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Precocious teenager Juliet moves to New Zealand with her family and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. This friendship gradually develops into an intense and obsessive bond.
Heavenly Creatures is a remarkable early Peter Jackson film that blends vivid fantasy sequences with the disturbing true-crime story of the Parker-Hulme murder case. The plot is distinctive and deeply compelling, weaving the girls' elaborate fantasy world (Borovnia) into the escalating real-world obsession with unsettling effectiveness. Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey deliver extraordinary performances — both in their debut or near-debut roles — conveying intensity, joy, and menace with rare authenticity. The cinematography is inventive and expressionistic, using oversaturated fantasy sequences and fluid camera work that feel genuinely cinematic. The film's novelty is high: its blend of whimsy and horror, its empathetic yet unflinching portrayal of the girls' psychology, and its unique visual grammar make it unmistakably singular. The ending, while true to history and effectively chilling, is somewhat constrained by the known factual record and doesn't quite achieve the emotional catharsis the build-up promises — it arrives abruptly and leaves the audience at a slight distance from full resolution.