Peter Jackson scored an early success with Heavenly Creatures (1994). It's based on a bizarre true story, a New Zealand murder by two disturbed teens (one of whom grew into a popular novelist!). Jackson imagines it as a tale of adolescent passion taken to extremes.Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) is a shy, withdrawn 14 year old in 1952 Christchurch. She instantly connects with Juliet Hume (Kate Winslet), a tubercular English girl who's smart, insouciant and imaginative. Bonding over outcast status and Mario Lanza records, Pauline and Juliet write fantasy novels set in Borovnia, overtaking their real lives. Juliet and Pauline decide to run away from home, viewing Pauline's mother Honoria (Sarah Peirse) as their obstacle.
Jackson and co-writer Fran Walsh probe a disturbing friendship grown awry. The girls grow inseparable, less friends than a codependent unit. Juliet's father (Clive Merrison) suspects homosexuality, which a psychiatrist (Gilbert Goldie) considers as contagious as Juliet's tuberculosis. There's certainly a charge to the girls' relationship, as they kiss, bathe and sleep together. But the connection's deeper, with Pauline and Juliet absorbed into a collective identity.
Jackson vividly details their interior adventures, from Juliet's garden morphing into a paradise, to nightmares of The Third Man's Harry Lime stalking them through Christchurch. Eventually they craft a full-scale world, with Pauline's clay models becoming life-sized, latex creatures. Jackson shows their imagination bleeding into reality; Pauline imagines murdering her psychiatrist and dreams of Borovnia during sex. It's only a matter of time until the girls mistake fiction for reality.
Heavenly Creatures avoids easy explanations. Pauline's parents are working class Kiwis with a hidden past, stern but not cruel. Juliet's parents divorce, driving the tragic denouement. Both without friends (Pauline from her personality, Juliet from her illness and constant moves), the girls surrender their fractured lives to fantasy. Like a distaff Leopold and Loeb, they're misfits harmless apart, destructive together.
In her debut, Kate Winslet proves a striking presence. Her refined cockiness gives way to desperation and hate, conveyed with thinly-restrained hysteria. Melanie Lynskey (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) opts for a more distant, measured approach, chillingly distant in later scenes. Among the adult cast, Sarah Peirse as Pauline's crude mother and Clive Merrison as Juliet's sympathetic, though uncomprehending dad fare best.
Heavenly Creatures dovetails adolescent angst, obsessive fantasy and mutual psychosis to devastating effect. Jackson covered similar ground in The Lovely Bones (2009) with much lesser results. That film tries too hard for maudlin artistry, whereas Creatures settles on appalled, uncomprehending fascination.
