Heavenly Creatures is a thriller/coming of age/black comedy kind of thing starring Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison, Simon O'Connor, and Jed Brophy. It's Peter Jackson's mainstream directorial debut, not to mention the feature film debuts of both Lynskey and Winslet.
In Christchurch, New Zealand, 1953, young Pauline Rieper (Lynskey) meets fellow high school student Juliet Hulme (Winslet) and they bond over previous illnesses (Pauline had osteomyelitis and Juliet had some kind of respiratory illness). Otherwise they're pretty different; Pauline's folks are working class, Juliet's are rich and English. Juliet's father (Merrison) is the rector of Canterbury University College, her mother (Kent) is a marriage counselor and is beautiful and poised. Meanwhile Pauline's father (O'Connor) is earnest and happy, but her mother (Peirse) is...well, a mom, and they don't get on.
Juliet and Pauline fall in love, and develop an elaborate fantasy world that wibbles between LARP, religion, and delusion. They write endless chapters in their fantasy/romance novel and talk about getting it published and going to Hollywood, but then things unravel because Juliet's mom bangs one of her clients (Peter Elliott), the Riper's border John (Brophy) falls in love with Pauline (this would be less of a problem if she weren't a) gay and b) 14), and the girls' parents start to realize that maybe these young ladies aren't just gals bein' pals.
Eventually the scandals in the Hulme household reach critical mass (as a side note, I'd would 100% watch a biopic about the life of Henry Hulme, because not only did this shit happen but he went on to be one of the originators of the atom bomb, a period in his life that's still shrouded in secrecy according to my extensive 30 seconds of research), Juliet's health worsens, and they decide to send her to South Africa and that Pauline is, um, not going along. With the fervor that only teenagers in love can manage, the girls become convinced that if Pauline's mother were no longer a factor that the Hulmes would let her go with her beloved "Deborah" (the girls use names from their novel for each other), Pauline and Juliet bash Pauline's mother's head in with a brick in a stock and then it was an accident.
I said it was a black comedy.
The movie ends at this point, so we only get title cards to tell us what happened next - they were both convicted of murder, served some time in prison, and then were released, on the condition they never meet again. Alas.
So, this movie got an Oscar nom for screenplay and that's definitely where the strength of the movie lies, along with Lynskey's performance. I think Winslet is overdoing it a little, though in fairness everything in this movie is hugely overwrought, and that's clearly a deliberate choice. The movie's tone on homosexuality, for example, is hilariously overblown to account for the idea of the time that it was a mental illness (a doctor, played by Gilbert Goldie, trying to bring himself to say the word is especially funny). Sarah Peirse is this one bubble of sanity and reality in the movie, and of course she's the one that winds up getting her head bashed in.
I think it works, though - there's a fantastical but eerie vibe to the movie and then we get to the murder scene and shit gets real as she screams and begs for her life in utter confusion. I like that we get to see that scene, and I like that it's not clean or simple - the murder in real life we just as a brutal. The movie leaves out how the police caught them (it wasn't hard: Pauline wrote down everything in her diaries, and we get to hear excerpts read out in the movie, wherein she describes her plans pretty clearly), and pretty much just ends after the murder so we don't get to see the aftermath. Sitting with it, I think that's better, because that would be entirely too much reality.
Also, if I have a nitpick, it's that the pacing of the movie is a little off. There are scenes that really could have been cut or that go on too long. It's not a long movie, and the fact that it kind of felt long tells me that something could have been cut or shot differently.
But with that said, it's clearly a great show of talent from three people who would go on to be really important in film, and it's a well-done black comedy, which, as I've said many times, is hard to pull off.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium-low
Next up: Krampus
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